United States, Legal History, African-American Studies, Discrimination & Racism, Law, Social Sciences, 1809-1858, Dred Scott, Slavery 

Cambridge studies on the American Constitution 

"Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil concerns what is entailed by pledging allegiance to a constitutional text and tradition saturated with concessions to evil. The Constitution of the United States was originally understood as an effort to mediate controversies between persons who disputed fundamental values and did not offer a vision of the good society. In order to form a "more perfect union" with slaveholders, late eighteenth-century citizens fashioned a constitution that plainly compelled some injustices and was silent or ambiguous on other questions of fundamental rights. This constitutional relationship could survive only as long as a bisectional consensus was required to resolve all constitutional questions not settled in 1787.Dred Scott challenges persons committed to human freedom to determine whether antislavery Northerners should have provided more accommodations for slavery than were constitutionally strictly necessary or risked the enormous destruction of life and property that preceded Lincoln's new birth of freedom."--Jacket. 

Content:

Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Rehabilitating Dred Scott -- The problem of constitutional evil -- Slavery as a constitutional evil -- pt. 1. The lessons of Dred Scott -- The Dred Scott decision -- Critiques of Dred Scott -- The institutional critique -- The historical critique -- The aspirational critique -- Critiquing the critiques -- The institutional critique -- The historical critique -- The aspirational critique -- Injustice and constitutional law -- The tyranny of examples -- From constitutional law to constitutional politics -- pt. 2. The constitutional politics of slavery -- The slavery compromises revisited -- The original constitutional politics of slavery -- Accommodating evil in 1787 -- Cracks in the constitutional consensus -- Toward the future -- The compromise and constitutional development -- The original constitutional order in action -- The constitutional order modified : 1820-1860 -- The Constitution and the Civil War -- Republican remedies and constitutional failure -- Law and politics.

pt. 3. Compromising with evil -- Majoritarianism and constitutional evil -- Lincoln's majoritarianism -- The majoritarian conception of constitutional evil -- Problems with democratic majoritarianism -- Contract, consent, and constitutional evil -- Lincoln on constitutional contracts and constitutional evil -- The contractual conception of constitutional evil -- The Constitution as a contract -- Cracks in the constitutional contract -- Frustration of constitution -- Constitutional relationships and constitutional evil -- The Constitution as a relational contract -- The constitutional case for abandoning the Constitution of 1787 -- Voting for John Bell -- Lincoln versus Bell -- The Constitution of today's Lincoln voters -- The Constitution of today's Bell voters -- Constitutional justice or constitutional peace -- Index. 

Includes bibliographical references and index.