To add to Matt Franck’s excellent post on the grossly defective comparison that Yale history professor David Blight draws, towards the end of his long New York Times Magazine essay, between the decisions in Dred Scott and in Dobbs:

Blight correctly observes that Justice Benjamin Curtis, who dissented in Dred Scott, “declar[ed] [Chief Justice Roger] Taney’s originalism bad history and false law.” But even as he cites Curtis’s reliance on the history “when the Constitution was adopted in 1787,” Blight seems not to recognize that Curtis, far from rejecting originalism, properly applied it. As Curtis declared rhetorically in exposing Taney’s deviation from originalism, if Taney were correct that “a prohibition of slavery in a Territory in 1820 violated this principle of [substantive due process], the ordinance of 1787 also violated it.” Further: “[W]hen 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.”

More broadly, it would seem that Blight doesn’t understand what the method of originalism consists of. To take a couple of the starkest examples: He wonders if “[w]omen’s suffrage” is “on the chopping block” and frets that “[v]oting rights are not in the original Constitution, either.” Does he really think that originalism applies only to the “original Constitution” and not to all the constitutional amendments?

While I’m at it: I’m also very sorry to see that a Yale history professor, in combination with NYT editors, can botch the elementary lie/lay distinction. From the last sentence of the essay: “we need to remember that antislavery advocates did not merely lay [sic!] down in front of the juggernaut of Dred Scott.”