In 1857, four of the U.S. Supreme Court justices hearing the Dred Scott v. Sanford case were slave owners. The chief justice at that time, Roger Taney, had freed his slaves, but desperate to avoid acrimony, he voted with the slave-owning judges in deciding that Scott, an enslaved Black man suing for his freedom, was not protected as a citizen by the U.S. Constitution. This failure by the Supreme Court was a contributory factor in the United States sliding into a civil war. Today, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have displayed the same levels of prejudice as the slave-owning justices …