Page:A legal review of the case of Dred Scott, as decided by the Supreme Court of the United States.djvu/58

 State courts even when construing their own Constitutions or laws, if opposed to former decisions of the same courts, or of the courts of the United States, especially as to contracts made and rights acquired while the first construction prevailed. Rowan v. Runnels, 5 Howard, 139; Ohio Life Insurance & Trust Company v. Debolt, 16 Howard, 431; Pease v. Peck, 18 Howard, 599. Justices McLean and Curtis, therefore, in refusing to be bound by the more recent State decisions against their own convictions of justice, only followed the modern practice of the supreme court of the United States. And we assent to the present decision as being a return to the older and sounder doctrine; though it must be confessed that the court could hardly have selected, for a revival of that doctrine, a State decision which was a greater violation of general principles of law or of the rights of the party, than the decision of the supreme court of Missouri in the plaintiff's case.

The most striking argument against allowing any binding force to the decision of the supreme court of Missouri is, that, as that decision was expressly founded on a refusal to allow any effect to rights secured by an act of congress admitted by that court to be valid, if the supreme court of the United States should hold itself bound by the decision, it would give effect, in a spirit of comity, to a decision which was arrived at only by refusing a like comity to the laws of the United States. But if, for reasons founded upon public policy, and upon the true relation between the State and federal governments, the political and social condition of the inhabitants of a State is, so far as it is not affected by the Constitution and laws of the United States, to be determined exclusively by the State courts, it can make no difference whether that condition is to be ascertained by a consideration of the Constitution and laws of that State, or of the extra-territorial effect to be given, in a spirit of comity, to other local laws, even if those laws happen to be acts of congress.

The other arguments against the conclusion of the majority of the court are founded on the disregard by the Missouri court of the rights of the plaintiff and his family, and of the helpless condition in which they would be left if the supreme court of the United States should refuse to interpose But the fact that, when the plaintiff married in the Territory, and returned to Missouri, he was, by the then well settled laws of that State, a freeman, though it proves the injustice of the decision of the State court, surely affords no reason why the courts of the United States should