There have been many decisions in the history of the US Supreme Court that are hard to call democratic. In the British North American colonies, and then in the USA, the legal foundations of the institution of slavery were created. The English legal system ruled out slavery, but gradually in the local laws of the colonies, and later in the Constitution of the United States and in the case-law of the Supreme Court of the United States, the grounds were formulated on which slaves were considered not to be human subjects, but property. This practice has led to the fact that, shortly before the Civil War, a racist attitude was legalized not only towards slaves, but also to the entire black population of the United States, as is clearly seen in the case of Dread Scott v. Sandford.
Dread Scott was a slave whose owner John Emerson took him from Missouri, the state where slavery was allowed, to Illinois, where slavery was prohibited. A few years later, Scott returned to Missouri with Emerson. Scott believed that since he lived in a free state, he should no longer be considered a slave.
Emerson died in 1843, and three years later, Scott sued Emerson's widow, demanding his freedom. In 1850, he won the case in one of the Missouri courts, but in 1852, the state supreme court overturned the lower court. Meanwhile, Ms. Emerson remarried, and Scott became the legal property of her brother John Sanford. Scott sued Sanford to regain his freedom. The case was investigated in one of the federal courts, which in 1854 ruled against Sanford.
When this case was referred to the Supreme Court, its members decided that Scott did not become free by virtue of his living in a free state and that, being a black man, he is not a citizen and, therefore, has no right to file a lawsuit with a court in force according to the norms of general and statutory law. This decision was widely criticized and contributed to the election of Abraham Lincoln as president.
The judgment in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case was declared unconstitutional by the thirteenth constitutional amendment, which abolished slavery in 1865, and the fourteenth amendment, which granted citizenship to former slaves in 1868.
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