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Dred Scott's Revenge - By applying positivism instead of natural law, 19th century courts...
Reason ^ | May 14, 2009 | Andrew Napolitano

Posted on 05/14/2009 7:45:29 PM PDT by neverdem

By applying positivism instead of natural law, 19th century courts burdened American racial history to this day.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that "all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," he could not have meant then what we understand these words to mean today.

When the framers of the government wrote in the Constitution that "No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," and that the Constitution is "the supreme Law of the Land," they conveniently omitted a definition of the word person. When presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Delano Roosevelt enforced two sets of laws themselves—one that treated whites fairly and one that treated blacks unfairly—or permitted the government to conduct gruesome medical experiments on black men, what did they think of their oaths to uphold the Constitution?

Jefferson's immortal words in the Declaration attached the new nation's soul to what lawyers and judges call the natural law. But when he bought and sold slaves, Jefferson rejected the natural law for himself, in favor of what lawyers and judges call positivism.

Natural law teaches that our rights come from our humanity. Since we are created by God in His image and likeness, and since He is perfectly free—or, if you prefer, since we are creatures of nature born biologically dependent but morally free—freedom is our birthright. Liberty comes from our humanity, not from an outside source such as the government.

Had the framers and their successors adhered to these beliefs for all persons, there could have been no slavery, no Jim Crow, no public segregation, and none of the evils they spawned.

(Article continues below video.)


In October 2007, Judge Andrew Napolitano told a Reason audience that "George W. Bush has shown less fidelity to the Constitution than any president since Abraham Lincoln." Click above to watch.



Unfortunately, positivism reared its ugly head. Positivism teaches that the law is whatever the lawgiver says it is, providing the rule is written down. Under positivism, so long as the legislature in a democracy was validly elected and followed its own rules in enacting a law, the law is valid and enforceable no matter what it says.

From the beginning of the settlement of the American colonies, the government sometimes enforced the natural law for whites but almost always enforced laws based on positivism for blacks. From slavery to war to Reconstruction to Jim Crow, the government presumed to pick and choose whose rights to respect and whose to reject, and it did so based on race.

The ultimate positivist rejection of the natural law happened to Dred Scott, a slave who sued for his freedom and lost. The sophomoric ratiocinations, moral contortions, and collectivist absurdities articulated by the Supreme Court of the United States as it purported to justify legally human slavery in Dred Scott v. Sandford spawned 150 years of horrific treatment of blacks that destroyed lives and suppressed freedom.

The Constitution's Original Sin

Slaves represented approximately 40 percent of the Southern population in 1789. Because apportionment was the vehicle through which interests would be represented in the new government, the more representatives were apportioned to a State, the more powerful that State would become. The number of allotted representatives was determined by population. Thus, Southern interests would be significantly threatened if slaves were not fully counted. Conversely, the North did not want the slaves counted at all in order to curtail Southern influence.

The result was the Three-Fifths Compromise. Widely considered to be the chief pro-slavery clause in the Constitution, it epitomized the racism of the document—as it reduced each slave to three-fifths of a person, a reflection of the inferior, subhuman class blacks would come to represent in the coming decades. Inherent in this compromise is a bitter irony, as it was the Southern slaveholding states that wanted slaves counted as full persons while the North and its abolitionists wanted slaves to remain uncounted; the slaves themselves, of course, had no say whatsoever in their constitutional standing.

Throughout the 19th century, American courts would repeatedly put the judicial stamp of approval on the institution of slavery. In 1804, the State of New Jersey enacted a law that declared "every child born of a slave, after the fourth of July of that year, should be free, but remain the servant of the owner of the mother until he or she should arrive at a specified age." The act was intended to abolish slavery gradually in New Jersey. In 1844, though, the state adopted a new constitution that held that "all men are by nature free and independent, and have certain natural and unalienable rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and of pursuing and obtaining safety and happiness." Abolitionists brought suit claiming that this provision of the new New Jersey Constitution prohibited slavery in the State irrespective of the 1804 act.

Justice James S. Nevius, writing for New Jersey's highest court in 1845, disagreed. In State v. Post, he found that if the state had wanted to abolish something as paramount as slavery, it would have done so explicitly and not through some "doubtful construction of an indefinite abstract political proposition." Further, he noted that American slavery as a whole had existed alongside the similarly constructed Declaration of Independence and that this was demonstrative that those general declarations in favor of liberty were not incompatible with the provisions that recognized slavery.

According to Justice Nevius, there was a distinction between freedom in the state of nature and freedom in a society; the latter was subject to the involuntary surrender of certain rights for the better protection of others via the social contract. While Nevius openly sympathized with the slaves and respected the arguments made by their counsel, he noted that "much of the argument seemed rather addressed to the feelings than to the legal intelligence of the court."

Justice Nevius' reasoning is rooted in legal positivism. The theory's fundamental premise is that there is a difference between what the law is and what the law should be, and that a responsible jurist should adhere to the current law and refrain from casting value judgments that are best reserved to the people through the exercise of their voting rights and the democratic process. This dilemma has confounded the legal world for millennia. Should social change be effectuated by an unelected judiciary or through the democratic processes embedded in our constitutional system? Should it perturb us when change is spurred by appointed judges, even if we find the change liberating? Or should it bother us when judges do not use their power to strike down laws that are consistent with positive law but inconsistent with natural law?

Interestingly, the Massachusetts Supreme Court reached the opposite conclusion of the New Jersey court in Commonwealth v. Ames in 1859. The language of the Massachusetts Constitution contained virtually the same language as the New Jersey Constitution. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw found the passage was enough to hold slavery illegal in Massachusetts, noting that "slavery is contrary to natural right, to the principles of justice and humanity, and repugnant to the constitution."

Where positivism is limited to laws passed by governments, natural law is not. Natural law knows only one authority: our own human nature. Therefore natural law would allow judges to strike down properly passed laws that infringe on our freedom of speech, worship, or assembly even if the Constitution did not protect those rights. The great individual liberties guaranteed by the Constitution reflect natural God-given rights that no government can properly restrict, absent a violation of natural law itself.

The American judiciary would remain at the forefront of the race issue throughout the 19th century. The courts' decisions would not be consistent. They would at times follow positivism and stick to the letter of the law and other times follow the natural law and free the oppressed. They would both take the lead in spurring change in American race relations and also hinder it. They would hand down some of the most heroic and some of the most infamous decisions in American history. The most infamous case would be Dred Scott v. Sandford, which came to epitomize America's ideological bipolarity and the federal government's racist agenda.

Dred Scott's Illegal Humanity

In antebellum America, whether blacks were free or slaves depended largely on the state in which they resided. As a result, abolitionists were quick to advocate the position that slaves would be permanently freed when taken to a free state. It was upon this theory that Dred Scott brought his claim to freedom to the United States Supreme Court.

Dred Scott was born enslaved to Peter Blow, the owner of an 860-acre farm in Virginia, in 1799; Blow sold him to Dr. John Emerson in 1833. Emerson, a Pennsylvanian, was appointed by the U.S. Army to a post in Illinois, then transferred to what is now St. Paul, Minnesota, an area where slavery was illegal. Scott bounced around with the Emerson family to Louisiana, Minnesota, and St. Louis, eventually suing for his freedom in 1846 after Emerson's widow Irene rejected his offer of $300 to purchase liberty for himself and his wife. A decade of legal wrangling later, Scott's last hope was an appeal to the United States Supreme Court against Irene Emerson's brother, John Sandford.

The Court's composition in 1857 was hardly sympathetic to slaves. Of the nine justices, seven had been appointed by Southern presidents, and five were from slaveholding families themselves. Chief Justice Taney, the man who would author the Dred Scott opinion, was himself a former slaveholder, a staunch supporter of slavery, and a defender of the South from what he saw as Northern aggression. Not surprisingly, the Court ruled that blacks were not considered (and were not intended to be considered) citizens under the Constitution. Therefore, they could not claim any of the rights and privileges the Constitution guaranteed and secured to citizens of the United States. According to Chief Justice Taney, "it [was] too plain for argument, that they [blacks] had never been regarded as a part of the people or citizens of the State, nor supposed to possess any political rights which the dominant race might not withhold or grant at their pleasure." Thus, because Dred Scott was not a citizen, he could not sue in the federal courts and diversity jurisdiction—which allows federal courts to hear cases between citizens of different states—was inappropriate.

Chief Justice Taney did not flat-out declare that blacks were inferior or unqualified for freedom by some absurd or backward theory. Rather, he justified his opinion on originalist grounds, arguing that it was rooted in what a strict interpretation of the Constitution, the supreme law of the land, would entail. "It is not the province of the Court to decide upon the justice or injustice, the policy or impolicy, of these laws," he wrote. Instead, "the duty of the court is, to interpret the instrument they have framed, with the best lights we can obtain on the subject, and to administer it as we find it, according to its true intent and meaning when it was adopted."

But to say that the Constitution's slavery provisions stripped all blacks of citizenship is absurd. The Three-Fifths Clause, the Importation Clause, and the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution simply cannot be read to remove citizenship from all blacks. At the time of the founding, 10 of the 13 states allowed free blacks to vote, as Justices Curtis and McLean pointed out in dissent. While five of those 10 states had either limited or completely withheld the right, assigning such meaning to the Constitution's text requires more than dispassionate adjudication; it represents an aggressive form of judicial activism to carve new meaning into the text of the Constitution. The logical conclusion of the Dred Scott decision is that the states were empowered to enslave free blacks.

The Court should have struck down slavery. But it had little, if any, positive law with which to justify such a move, given the explicit slavery provisions in the Constitution. The Court would have had to base such a decision wholly on natural law.

The Case for Natural Law

The Dred Scott holding was overruled by the Thirteenth Amendment, enacted and ratified in 1865, which abolished slavery; and by the Slaughter-House cases, decided in 1873, in which the Court held that the amendment superseded the Taney Court's ruling. But the essence of Chief Justice Taney's despicable opinion was not overruled. Blacks were still treated like second-class citizens, a fact that was fueled by the positivist idea that government can write any law, enact any policy, and enforce any cultural norm, so long as the measure has popular support.

The teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas indicate otherwise. Aquinas' fundamental premise is that a well-formed conscience will naturally seek good and avoid evil. His theory places much faith in human nature-that the truth is available to all people through informed human reasoning and recognition of divine revelation. Yet Aquinas did not stop there. He wrote that because governments do not have the right to enact unjust laws, only just laws need to be obeyed. Moreover, unjust laws carry with them a duty of disobedience. If laws do not seek and promote goodness, they are unjust and in violation of natural law-and our cognizance of this requires us to disobey them.

Prominent American figures have shown support for natural law. Justice Clarence Thomas once said: "Without such a notion of natural law, the entire American political tradition, from Washington to Lincoln, from Jefferson to Martin Luther King, would be unintelligible." He said that he subscribes to this principle because it guarantees equality, even if the words of the Constitution do not. "Natural rights and higher law arguments are the best defense of liberty and of limited government."

The founders, especially Thomas Jefferson, believed in natural law, which positive law could not lawfully contradict. "A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest," Jefferson wrote. "The laws of necessity, [and] of self-preservation...are of higher obligation." And in the Declaration of Independence he wrote that we are "endowed by our Creator" with certain inalienable rights. For Jefferson and his fellow founders, natural law was necessarily discovered.

The great Martin Luther King Jr., in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," explained that "an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law." In arguing that government-enforced segregation is morally wrong because it "distorts the soul and damages the personality," King used the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas to urge men to disobey the unjust segregation laws.

Is it the role of the courts to sidestep the positive law of the land when natural law is violated? My own view is an unequivocal yes. The standard should be an unmistakable deference to liberty.

Whatever any government does (unless it is preserving freedom by enforcing the natural law) should be suspect. Government either compels behavior or forbids behavior. Some behavior should be compelled (driving safely, for example) and some behavior should be forbidden (violating another's right to life, liberty, and property, for example). Whatever else the government does, no matter what it claims the goal is and no matter the stated justification, because it curtails human freedom it should be suspect and presumed to be unlawful and unconstitutional. If these libertarian principles had been accepted throughout history, then slavery-an obvious violation of natural rights-and all the evils it has spawned would never have existed here.

The real culprit throughout our racial history has been the government. The government-local, state, and federal-at virtually every turn, in every generation, and in innumerable ways, selectively chose to enact and enforce laws based on the natural law or on positivism, depending on race. Relying on the laws of positivism, the government permitted, condoned, and protected the most horrific abuse imaginable to blacks, and to some of the whites who protested.

Without a fundamental, obvious public rejection of positivism and embrace of the natural law by the government, the courts should presume that what the government seeks to do is unconstitutional; the government should be compelled to justify constitutionally, under the natural law and morally, whatever it wants to do, whenever and wherever it wants to do it. When the government protects freedom and respects natural rights, it is doing its job. When it ceases to protect freedom and when it violates natural rights, it is the duty of the people to alter or abolish it.

Andrew P. Napolitano, the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of the State of New Jersey, is senior judicial analyst for the Fox News Channel. His most recent book is Dred Scott's Revenge (Thomas Nelson), from which this article is adapted. Copyright 2009 by Andrew P. Napolitano.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Editorial; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: andrewnapolitano; dredscott; napolitano; naturallaw; positivism
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Video is at the source. His speech is pretty good so far, at least 10 minutes so far.
1 posted on 05/14/2009 7:45:29 PM PDT by neverdem
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To: neverdem
A little correction on the 3/5 compromose ~ there'd already been a compromise regarding New England. In the Treaty of Paris each unit of the Colony of New England was treated as an independent nation, so you ended up with Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire ~ rather than just "New England".

This disparate treatment had to be balanced in the new Constitution of 1790 in some manner to give the Southern States (and Virginia, which was then the most populous state) MORE votes in Congress.

New England then would end up the heavyweight in the Senate, and the South would end up the heavyweight in the House if slaves were counted.

In brief, slaves became ciphers for the purpose of reaching a compromise in relative power in Congress. If there'd been no need to rectify the error of the Treaty of Paris they wouldn't have needed to have been counted at all!

2 posted on 05/14/2009 7:53:14 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: neverdem

Ave Maria School of Law was founded in 2000 to re-invigorate and re-introduce natural law principles into the practice of law.

Do you know of any other schools that are similarly committed to doing so?


3 posted on 05/14/2009 8:00:17 PM PDT by Notwithstanding (very punny)
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To: muawiyah

Their moral dignity as men would have ultimately made their votes count, IMHO. Eventually they would have been counted.

Perhaps the most immediate and effective remedy for the situation would be to allow natural law to operate — allow the slaves to vote! See what they have to say.


4 posted on 05/14/2009 8:05:35 PM PDT by Unknowing (Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.)
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To: Unknowing

I’d have just given them rights to keep and bear arms. Slavery would have ended pretty darned quick!


5 posted on 05/14/2009 8:09:10 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: neverdem

The problem being that natural law isn’t written down anywhere, while positive law is. If my understanding of human nature is anywhere near correct; the sanction of ‘natural law’ amounts to no more than an infinite pretext for a judge to apply all his personal prejudices without even the subterfuge of restraint.


6 posted on 05/14/2009 8:15:56 PM PDT by eclecticEel (I don't want Obama to fail, I want him to fail quickly.)
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To: muawiyah

Indeed, such remains their natural and lawful right.


7 posted on 05/14/2009 8:16:24 PM PDT by Unknowing (Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.)
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To: muawiyah
A little correction on the 3/5 compromose ~ there'd already been a compromise regarding New England. In the Treaty of Paris each unit of the Colony of New England was treated as an independent nation, so you ended up with Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire ~ rather than just "New England"

Utter nonsense. There had been a Dominion of New England only for about four years under the tyrannical rule of James II. It also included New York and the Jerseys.

When James was kicked out in 1689 his arrangements fell apart, the colonies promptly returning to their original status as separate entities. IOW, by the time of the Constitutional Convention nobody was still around who even remembered when there had been a single colony of New England.

Also, Vermont wasn't mentioned in the Treaty of Paris, as it was an area in dispute between NH and NY at the time.

8 posted on 05/14/2009 8:17:41 PM PDT by Sherman Logan (Everyone has a right to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.)
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To: eclecticEel
the sanction of ‘natural law’ amounts to no more than an infinite pretext for a judge to apply all his personal prejudices without even the subterfuge of restraint.

Absolutely correct. People will have different opinions about what natural law is, at least for some issues, and positive law is required to settle these issues.

In our society, it seems that at present most of the issues over which natural law is disputed involve sexuality in one form or another. People have very different world views. Their definition of what constitutes "the good" differ, so of course they cannot agree on which laws will promote the good.

9 posted on 05/14/2009 8:20:25 PM PDT by Sherman Logan (Everyone has a right to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.)
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To: Sherman Logan
New England as a Crown Colony was set up shortly after the Pequod War ~ or around 1676.

This was viewed as a great reform at the time!

10 posted on 05/14/2009 8:27:41 PM PDT by muawiyah
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placemark.


11 posted on 05/14/2009 8:32:38 PM PDT by IYAS9YAS (Obama - what you get when you mix Affirmative Action with the Peter Principle.)
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To: muawiyah

The New England Confederation was a loose political and military alliance of most of the New England colonies. It was established in 1643 and fell apart in 1684. It was by no definition a Crown Colony.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Confederation

The centralized Dominion of New England, which was a crown colony, was imposed on the New England colonies as well as NY and the Jerseys from 1686 to 1689. It was overthrown by the colonists as soon as they received word of the Glorious Revolution by which the Whigs of England kicked out James II and gave the throne to William and Mary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_of_New_England

You’re confusing two separate entities, neither of which was more than an extremely vague memory by the time of the Treaty of Paris in 1783.


12 posted on 05/14/2009 8:36:08 PM PDT by Sherman Logan (Everyone has a right to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.)
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To: Sherman Logan
True, but Vermont received the same status (as far as the Europeans were concerned). It actually acted as an independent state for many years and exchanged ambassadors with European countries. It was admitted as a new state in 1791.

NOT PEQUOD, SEE KING PHILIP'S WAR ~ which is a few decades later.

13 posted on 05/14/2009 8:37:12 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: muawiyah

You may have heard of this Declaration. It starts off: “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.”

http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm

Not the 9 it would have been had the four New England states been part of a single entity. You might also note that the signers are all listed by State. No New England.

I only pursue this rather silly discussion because you appear to be justifying the 3/5 rule on the basis that it was only compensation for earlier southern concession to the New England states of allowing them to register as four states rather than one.

This is flatly inaccurate. Please see my tagline.


14 posted on 05/14/2009 8:45:27 PM PDT by Sherman Logan (Everyone has a right to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.)
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To: Sherman Logan
There's more than one instance of questionable numerics in that document. The reference to the 14th colony may have meant Quebec, or simply the Ohio Country. Virginia ended up with the Western lands it sought.

The Declaration allowed the separate units of New England to sign on separately, but that didn't mean things were really run that way.

15 posted on 05/14/2009 8:51:32 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: Sherman Logan
The concessions to New England had been made over a long period of time.

The fellows who signed the Mecklenburg Resolves didn't particularly care about New England, but New Yorkers and Virginians did.

16 posted on 05/14/2009 8:52:50 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: Sherman Logan

You raise some excellent points for consideration; however, there is no reason that natural law cannot be codified. After all, we have the divine law written on stone, and natural law flows from divine law, since God created the natural world and left his finger prints upon it. I am thinking that common law, and commonsense are closer to natural law (conscience) than Positivism.


17 posted on 05/14/2009 9:14:35 PM PDT by Nosterrex
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To: neverdem
"Had the framers and their successors adhered to these beliefs for all persons, there could have been no slavery, no Jim Crow, no public segregation, and none of the evils they spawned."

This sort of implies that the framers started with a clean slate,which they absolutely did not. The inherited corruption of slavery was very well established long before the Declaration and the Constitution, and indeed, was already beginning to wane, albeit slowly, at the time of the Constitution. If anything, the Constitution hastened the end of slavery.

While it is true that the British ended slavery in 1833, their economic system was not nearly as tied into slavery as was the case in the American South, making the transition relatively easier. Had we remained in the original Confederation and NOT adopted the Constitution, I have no doubt that slavery would have continued into the early 1900's.

18 posted on 05/14/2009 9:18:28 PM PDT by cookcounty (He who controls the Language controls the Debate.)
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To: neverdem
Napolitano: "Natural law teaches that our rights come from our humanity. Since we are created by God in His image and likeness, and since He is perfectly free—or, if you prefer, since we are creatures of nature born biologically dependent but morally free—freedom is our birthright. Liberty comes from our humanity, not from an outside source such as the government."

They no longer teach this in schools. They do not teach students how to distinguish between positivism and natural law or the basis of human rights in the Constitution.

19 posted on 05/14/2009 9:28:16 PM PDT by HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity
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To: HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity

Yes, and this is based on Locke, who in turn, learned it from the Bible.


20 posted on 05/14/2009 10:13:54 PM PDT by fortheDeclaration ("Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people".-John Adams)
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