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    Dred Scott's Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America
    Dred Scott's Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America
    Dred Scott's Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America
    Ebook282 pages14 hours

    Dred Scott's Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America

    By Andrew P. Napolitano

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Racial hatred is one of the ugliest of human emotions. And the United States not only once condoned it, it also mandated it?wove it right into the fabric of American jurisprudence. Federal and state governments legally suspended the free will of blacks for 150 years and then denied blacks equal protection of the law for another 150.

    How did such crimes happen in America? How were the laws of the land, even the Constitution itself, twisted into repressive and oppressive legislation that denied people their inalienable rights?

    Taking the Dred Scott case of 1957 as his shocking center, Judge Andrew P. Napolitano tells the story of how it happened and, through it, builds a damning case against American statesmen from Lincoln to Wilson, from FDR to JFK.

    Born a slave in Virginia, Dred Scott sued for freedom based on the fact that he had lived in states and territories where slavery was illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Scott, denied citizenship to blacks, and spawned more than a century of government-sponsored maltreatment that destroyed lives, suppressed freedom, and scarred our culture.

    Dred Scott's Revenge is the story of America's long struggle to provide a new context?one in which "All men are created equal," and government really treats them so.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThomas Nelson
    Release dateApr 20, 2009
    ISBN9781418575571
    Author

    Andrew P. Napolitano

    Judge Andrew P. Napolitano is Fox News Channel's senior judicial analyst, currently seen by millions of viewers weeknights on The Big Story and The O'Reilly Factor. Napolitano is the youngest person in New Jersey history to receive a lifetime judgeship. He is bright (graduate of Princeton and Notre Dame Law School), articulate (four times voted most outstanding professor at the two law schools at which he taught), and broadcast-experienced (as a daily fixture on Fox News Channel since 1998). He is the author of Constitutional Chaos and The Constitution In Exile.

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    4.5/5

    11 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The author doesn't forget to try to persuade us that the federal government made matters worse, not better, and that bail-outs, abortion, etc. are Unconstitutional; still, if one can look past the book's erroneous conclusions, one finds a well-written, thought-provoking biography of the spirit of American slavery.
    • 5/5
      This book starts with a bang. He is challenging the attitudes and actions of the founding fathers in the introduction and doesn’t slow down after that. The book covers history, politics, judicial rulings, and long-term effects of each major step in our nation’s path. The author offers a framework for looking at slavery and then uses that framework to show the wrong choices and bad values that kept slavery, segregation, and the view that blacks were an inferior race alive for so long in the United States.

      He challenges a lot of what I learned in school and backs it up pretty well. He argues a few things that I am still not convinced about but that doesn’t detract from the truth of the book. Even if I think the founding fathers had little choice if they were going to create a united country, his point is well made when it goes on for another 200 years and not only does the federal government allow the South to keep slavery/segregation, but then it starts to institutionalize it across the entire nation.

      He teaches more than just racism and sees more concerns with our government’s behavior than just race-related. But the arena of race is an excellent example of the issues and a subject worthy of more attention and effort.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book presents not only an excellent and easily understandable legal history of race and freedom in America, but also an outstanding and concise summary of two different and oppositely opposing approaches to "the law" that are necessary to know about if one seeks to understand the history of slavery and racism in America. As Judge Napolitano informs us in his Introduction, “[t]his book tells the unhappy story of the rejection of the natural law and the embracing of positivism by the government in America at every level, based on the ugliest of collectivist positivist ideology: This ideology is that of hatred based on race.”

      According to Napolitano, the one approach to the law, called natural law, teaches that our rights come from our humanity. The other approach, called positivism, teaches that the law is whatever the [human] lawgiver says it is, providing it is written down. Napolitano argues that “only by adherence to the natural law, by a rejection of positivism, and by upholding the Constitution can our freedoms remain secure.”

      Napolitano argues for a fundamental and obvious “public rejection of positivism and embrace of the natural law by government…”. In terms of judicial interpretation of the laws passed by Congress, Napolitano advocates that “the courts should presume that what the government seeks to do is unconstitutional; the government should be compelled to justify constitutionality, under the natural law and morally, what it wants to do, whenever and wherever it wants to do it.”

      Is there a written standard that we can examine to see the contours of the natural law? Are courts or legislative bodies capable of articulating the limits of what comprises the natural law? Napolitano does not go into detail on the extensive arguments as to whether judicial interpretation of laws should be based upon positivism or natural law. But he shows quite clearly the effects of those differing approaches to “the law” and the great harm done by “legal positivism” to generations of Americans—including at least a hundred years of “freemen” who were abused of their natural rights to life and liberty from the “end” of the American Civil War to at least the times beginning with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s.

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