The Dred Scott Case and Its Legacy:
Race, Law, and the Struggle for Equality
March 1 - 3, 2007Washington University in St. Louis
Video and a DVD of the event can be found here.
This symposium commemorated the 150th anniversary of one of the most infamous decisions rendered by the United States Supreme Court. The Dred Scott Case, which originated in St. Louis, articulated a doctrine of legally sanctioned inequality, the effects of which were only partially remedied by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The three-day symposium examined the role of law and the courts in promoting racial equality, beginning with the legal strategies of black and white abolitionists before 1857 and continuing through efforts from Reconstruction to the present to make meaningful the full legal citizenship that the decision denied.
The symposium involved the participation of distinguished scholars, judges, legal professionals, K-12 educators, students, and members of the St. Louis community. It began with a keynote address by the Honorable Michael A. Wolff, Chief Justice of the Missouri Supreme Court, an avid student of the case and, as Chief Justice, the direct judicial descendant of the man who denied the Scotts their rights at the state level. Among other speakers were Judge Duane Benton of the United States Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, Professor Jack Greenberg (who argued the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954), Paul Finkelman (the senior scholar of the Dred Scott Case, whose writings are the definitive works on the subject), and William Wiecek (an important scholar on antebellum constitutional slave cases). A full list of speakers can be found on the Speakers page. We were also honored by the participation of Lynne Madison Jackson, the great-great-granddaughter of Dred and Harriet Scott.