udicial decisions are of greater or less authority as precedents
according to circumstances. That this should be so accords both with
common sense and the customary understanding of the legal profession.

If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of
the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with
legal public expectation and with the steady practice of the departments
throughout our history, and had been in no part based on assumed
historical facts which are not really true; or, if wanting in some of
these, it had been before the court more than once, and had there been
affirmed and reaffirmed through a course of years, it then might be,
perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, not to acquiesce in
it as a precedent.

But when, as is true, we find it wanting in all these claims to the public
confidence, it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even
disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled
doctrine for the country. But Judge Douglas considers this view awful.
Hear him:

"The courts are the tribunals prescribed by the Constitution and created
by the authority of the people to determine, expound, and enforce the law.
Hence, whoever resists the final decision of the highest judicial tribunal
aims a deadly blow at our whole republican system of government--a blow
which, if successful, would place all our rights and liberties at the
mercy of passion, anarchy, and violence. I repeat, therefore, that if
resistance to the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, in
a matter like the points decided in the Dred Scott case, clearly within
their jurisdiction as defined by the Constitution, shall be forced upon
the country as a political issue, it will become a distinct and naked
issue between the friends and enemies of the Constitution--the friends and
the enemies of the supremacy of the laws."

Why, this same Supreme Court once decided a national bank to be
constitutional; but General Jackson, as President of the United States,
disregarded the decision, and vetoed a bill for a recharter, partly on
constitutional ground, declaring that each public functionary must support
the Constitution "as he understands it." But hear the General's own words.
Here they are, taken from his veto message:

"It is maintained by the advocates of the bank that its constitutionality,
in all its features, ought to be considered as