Setting aside morality, from a purely legal standpoint how sound was the Supreme Court's ruling in the Dredd Scott case of 1857?

The short answer is that yes, your high school teacher is wrong. Yet, it's not that simple. The dred Scott decision is one huge tangled mess of questionable jurisprudence mixed with racism, divisive politics, and unsound legal basis.

Now at first I would say that the legal aspect as to why the decision was wrong (a legal question) is separate from what law scholars thought of the decision at the time (a historical question). Yet, I think this question belongs in this sub because the opinions that rebut this decision were actually contemporary to the case and are extremely tied to historical context of the framer's time and Taney's time. In other words, it's not merely that we, 150 years in the future, recognize that such a decision was bad legally and morally, but other law scholars of time, including a Supreme Court justice, did so too, and they used the same historical and legal arguments we would use today.

[this paper by Robert Burt from Yale Law] (http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1801&context=fss_papers) is an excellent explanation of how wrong justice Taney was when he made the decision from a legal standpoint, though the moral angles aren't lost in the paper. It also contextualizes the decision with the opinion of other contemporary legal experts.

So to tackle the main points of the decision. First, Taney ruled that black couple were not citizens of the U.S. and so had no standing to sue in federal court. The problem was that many northern states had given citizenship to blacks, so Taney had to argue that state citizenship was separate from federal citizenship, and having one didn't mean you automatically had the other. Additionally, he argued from strict constructionist interpretation of the constitution that because the framers of the constitution did not originally intend on having black people be included as citizens of the us, they could never become citizens.

It was this point that justice Curtis attacked in his dissent. He didn't argue that state and federal citizenship weren't separate, but that the path to federal citizenship was through state citizenship. And that if a black person became a citizen of a state, he could then become a U.S. Citizen. He based this on a review of records that showed that, at the time of the ratification of the constitution, 5 of the original 13 states had already granted citizenship to blacks. This flies in the face of Taney's argument that the the framers of the constitution did not intend to have black people be citizens.

It's not that the framers expected the constitution to apply to black people, but when it was drafted, it already did because it didn't exclude them explicitly. The framers didn't expect that the constitution would interfere with slavery the way Scott was arguing it did because they hadn't foreseen the draconian measures the south would impose on its slaves and how central its protection would become to the unity of the nation. So Taney had to ask himself if the framers would've considered withholding citizenship from blacks explicitly if they had foreseen the context of slavery in 1857. And he reasoned that, because of how careful they had been to protect slavery in the constitution, they would have. In this point, it seems that historically, Taney might have been right, but legally still wrong.

The second point in Taney's decision was that the Missouri compromise was unconstitutional because the government cannot deprive people of property without due process.

This is both historically and legally a problem for Taney because the constitution explicitly allows for the federal government to create necessary rules and regulations towards property of the United States. This means that congress could ban slavery on territory that had not become a state yet, which is what the Missouri compromise did. Taney argued that this only applied to territory that belonged to the U.S. and wasn't a state at the time of ratification. This was historically and legally unfounded because there was nothing he could cite to give him this opinion. His opinion was based, again, on asking himself whether the framers had considered how central slavery would be to holding their new nation together in the future. In other words, he argued that the framers had intended the rules and regulations powers to apply only to non state territories at the time of ratification to solve a disputed that was contemporary to them, and because they could not have foreseen how legalization of slavery in new states would become of such overwhelming significance, the language in article IV section 3 that allows congress to ban slavery in territories only applied to those that existed at the time of ratification.

And here we come to the real weakness in Taney's argument. The fugitive slave clause in article IV section 2 recognized the right of property of a master in a slave and the 5th amendment's property protections is directly in contradiction with article IV section 3. The framers hadn't solved this issue, and they had omitted the solution on purpose because they saw that slavery had to be protected, but couldn't admit in the constitution the idea of property in men. They had deliberately left this vague and opted for the future generations to solve it.

The problem Taney's ruling had was that he grabbed hold of this contradiction, a huge one at that, and opted to solve it for the side of slavery. This was wrong because of the constitution as properly understood in the context of the framers and applied to the context of 1857, it could not possibly answer that contradiction.

Compare and contrast this to the way brown vs board of education was ruled. Both were litigated by parties that saw their defeat as intolerable. A decision in favor of either party will result in huge backlash. This is a very important dilemma to recognize under democratic principles. The only way out of it is war or long, introspective, and painful public discussion, not judicial review.

Taney seems to have been completely oblivious this fact. He attempted to completely shut off all public discussion of the slavery issue by solving an unsolvable contradiction with stretched logic and unsound historical and legal reasoning. It's really important to understand what he did. If he had ruled the opposite way, it would've been just as bad.

In brown vs board, The court opined that the historical sources were inconclusive. In other words, they could not possibly interpret the framer's intent in the context of 1957's segregation laws. And the court was honest about this fact. In effect, the decision unsettled a dispute between two litigants that had been settled in favor of one of them already, and which the other found as intolerable. You see what I'm saying there? This decision restored the discussion of race relations to public discussion in a way that Taney sought to shut down.

Anyway, I've rambled on forever, and I really suggest you take a look at that Yale law paper because it is very worth the time.