article_snippet.sent: Hugo Black, the Supreme Court justice who did the most to make Lincoln's constitutional vision a reality over the next century, was born and raised in Alabama.
article_snippet.sent: So was Lincoln's nemesis on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roger Taney.
article_snippet.sent: Taney's most infamous ruling, the pro-slavery Dred Scott decision in 1857, had emerged from a court dominated by the South; although slave states accounted for less a third of America's free population, this region held an absolute majority of the seats on the Supreme Court.
article_snippet.sent: In our era, given the fact that Republican appointees have held a majority of the Supreme Court for the last 40 years, the Supreme Court has been rather moderate.
article_snippet.sent: Much of this moderation has come courtesy of northern Republicans on the Supreme Court -- most notably, Minnesota's Harry Blackmun, Illinois' John Paul Stevens, and New Hampshire's David Souter.
article_snippet.sent: All nine of the current justices learned the current justices law in liberal New England, at Harvard or Yale, and the Republican appointee most attentive to gay rights, Anthony Kennedy, grew up in northern California, a corner of the country renowned for the country respect for alternative lifestyles.
article_snippet.sent: When Anthony Kennedy was a lad in California's state capital, the governor, a friend of the Kennedy family, was a Lincoln Republican named Earl Warren -- a man who would later author the Supreme Court's iconic opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, vindicating the constitutional amendments enshrined by Lincoln and Anthony Kennedy allies.