Chief Justice Of The U.S. Supreme Court

Taney in History.

Roger Brooke Taney is remembered generally for having authored the majority decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), perhaps the single worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court — a "ghastly error" by the reckoning of one important legal scholar. According to a later chief justice, Charles Evans Hughes, Dred Scott became one clear example where "the Court . . . suffered severely from self-inflicted wounds." Yet regardless of that notorious decision, a small but formidable body of judicial scholars in the late twentieth century consider Taney to be one of the great justices of the Supreme Court, ranked alongside John Marshall, Louis Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Background and Early Career.

Taney was born in Calvert County, Maryland, in 1777 to an aristocratic planter family. He was educated in rural schools and by a private tutor...