How SCOTUS Could End Birthright Citizenship
In 1832 US Army Surgeon John Emerson bought the slave Dred Scott from Peter Blow to be his manservant, then traveled into a free state and then free territories for years. He bought a wife for Dred then Emerson died in Iowa Territory in 1843 and Emerson’s wife Irene inherited Scott and his wife Harriet. After trying to purchase their freedom from Irene Emerson and failing, Irene remarried and her brother John Sanford inherited Dred and Harriet. When they were in Missouri in 1846 Dred and Harriet sued for their freedoms on the grounds that they had resided in free states for years and won their case, then it was appealed and they lost both of their appeals at the state and at the US Supreme Court, where for the first time a style of jurisprudence called Originalism was popular on the Court. Essentially, they only cared about what the original writers would have meant when they wrote the Constitution and what was in the Constitution, and in 1857 decided in Dred Scott vs Sandford (the SCO...