Benjamin Robbins Curtis
This Whig justice issued a fiery dissent in the Dred Scott case, defending Black citizenship and condemning the court's pro-slavery ruling.
1809–1874 (age 65)·US Supreme Court justice from 1851 to 1857·Birthday: November 4
Biography
Benjamin Robbins Curtis, the first Supreme Court justice to hold a formal law degree, dissented in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857. A Harvard-trained lawyer from Massachusetts, he served on the antebellum bench from 1851 to 1857. His meticulous, scathing rebuttal argued from historical precedent that free Black men had been citizens at the nation's founding. He assailed the majority ruling—that African Americans could not be citizens and Congress could not ban slavery in territories—as political overreach. The controversy contributed to his resignation later that year. Curtis returned to a lucrative private practice. He defended President Andrew Johnson during his impeachment trial. He placed law above the political tempests of his age.
#1 When Benjamin Was Born
The biggest hits of 1809
Benjamin's Life & Times
The world at every milestone
1809Born
1814Started school
1822Became a teenager
1825Could drive
1827Could vote
1830Turned 21
1839Turned 30
1849Turned 40
1859Turned 50
1869Turned 60
President: Ulysses S. Grant
1874Died at 65
President: Ulysses S. Grant
Key Achievements
- Authored one of the two dissenting opinions in the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court case.
- Served as the first Supreme Court justice to possess a formal law degree, graduating from Harvard Law.
- Successfully defended President Andrew Johnson as a lead counsel during his 1868 impeachment trial in the Senate.
Did You Know?
He was the only Whig Party member ever to serve on the United States Supreme Court.
He resigned from the Supreme Court in part due to the backlash from his Dred Scott dissent and disagreements with Chief Justice Taney.
His brother, George Ticknor Curtis, was also a prominent lawyer and authored a two-volume biography of Daniel Webster.
“When a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no longer a Constitution; we are under the government of individual men, who for the time being have power to declare what the Constitution is, according to their own views of what it ought to mean.”
