| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857. By Austin Allen. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. xii, 274 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8203-2653-4. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-8203-2842-1.)

When considering Roger B. Taney, one has to confront the contrast between the justice who wrote the Charles River Bridge opinion in 1837 and the justice who wrote the opinion in the Dred Scott case twenty years later. Austin Allen proposes that Taney's modernizing, pro-corporate attitudes shaped his arguments about slavery, and that this explains the ruling in the Dred Scott case. In making his argument, Allen seeks to move beyond what he calls the "orthodoxy" that focuses on the sectional divide over slavery. Instead, Allen wants to present the case as an expression of developing legal doctrine rather than of extrajudicial politics. This is old-fashioned court-centered legal history, and Allen presents a reading of Taney's opinion that is at least charitable, and, at points, downright sympathetic.

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