“How dare you insert yourself in these deliberations?”
This quote from Derrick Bell’s Constitutional Contradiction indicates that the Founders' original constitutional settlement did not intend American descendants of slavery to participate in and contribute to the American law-making process. That being said, abolitionists, people of African descent, and others have used the Founders' own ideals, laws, and values as instruments to support projects in tension with the original constitutional settlement. Identify some of the arguments that slaves, their descendants, and abolitionists have contributed to the American political discourse that pushed back on the original constitutional settlement. How do they use textualist or intentionalist readings of the U.S. constitutional tradition to support their arguments? How do such arguments compare to Chief Justice Taney's constitutional analysis in the Dred Scott case?
In addition to Taney's Dred Scott opinion, you may find it helpful to consider Bell’s Constitution Contradiction and Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, among other sources and topics from this course.
The hallmarks of an excellent paper are: (1) original and critical argument; (2) organized presentation of evidence and ideas; (3) evidence drawn from the course materials that supports the argument and clear explanations of why that is; (4) well-chosen, readable, error-free prose. In particular, a paper should have a clear thesis that is laid out in the first paragraph. Each subsequent paragraph should advance that argument. Each paragraph should also have a topic sentence that foreshadows what the paragraph as a whole will say while also signaling how the paragraph advances the argument
Sample Solution