| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Austin Allen. Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857. (Studies in the Legal History of the South.) Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2006. Pp. x, 274. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.95.
Received wisdom about the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) runs something like this: Dred Scott was the judicial expression of partisan prejudice through which an overreaching Court decisively cast its lot with both slavery and the South in what had become a festering sectional struggle; the Court, moreover, got the law wrong; and the decision, therefore, reveals the danger of unbridled judicial activism. Austin Allen challenges every element of this wisdom.	1
Allen has read more than 1,600 of the Court's decisions reported from 1837 to 1861. He concludes that Dred Scott emerged naturally—indeed "inescapably" (p. 6)—from doctrinal disputes with which the Court had been wrestling for at least two decades. In short, the Court in Dred Scott was primarily (and correctly) applying the law and not merely pursuing politics or promoting personal predilection.	2
Several scholars, including myself, have traced the doctrinal roots of Dred Scott through prior decisions involving especially the status of sojourners, transients, and fugitives. Allen argues, however, that we cannot understand the Court's motives and conclusions in Dred Scott without also taking into account developments in three other doctrinal areas: the expansion of the scope of diversity jurisdiction; the recognition of corporations as "quasi-citizens" for purposes of diversity; and the emergence (via Swift v. Tyson [1842]) of a federal common law independent from and sometimes antagonistic to the common law decisions of states' courts.	. . .

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