  It is clear that, on this legal interpretation of the Constitution, the civil rights of blacks are fundamentally incompatible with the property rights of citizens, as long as slavery is legal anywhere. Written by Chief Justice Taney on the eve of the Civil War, the opinion in Scott v. Sandford (1856)—the Dred Scott case—provides a most dramatic version of the narrow constitutional reading of black legal rights. The Negro has no rights a white man is bound to respect, Taney famously concluded, and thus Dred and Harriet Scott, two slaves suing for their freedom, were ruled ineligible to bring that suit before the Court. Moreover, the problem was not confined to enslaved blacks. Not only did Taney conclude that blacks were not citizens, he held that they would not be citizens even if freed. And no individual state could by extending legal rights to blacks make them citizens of the Union proper. These holdings helped shut down several promising argument strategies available to Crummell.