Many constitutional scholars consider the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case—formally Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford—to be the worst decision ever rendered by the Court. In particular, it has been cited as the most egregious example in the history of the Court wrongly imposing a judicial solution on a political problem. Charles Evans Hughes, a later chief justice, famously characterized the decision as the Court’s great “self-inflicted wound.”
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