Weinberg on Dred Scott and the Crisis of 1860

Louise Weinberg, University of Texas, has posted an essay, Dred Scott and the Crisis of 1860. It is appearing in a symposium issue of the Chicago-Kent Law Review on the 150th Anniversary of the Dred Scott Decision, edited by Paul Finkelman, Jack M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson. Here's Weinberg's abstract:

This article argues the centrality of the Dred Scott case in the election of Abraham Lincoln and to the national crisis of 1860. Taking the view that the struggle over the expansion of slavery into the territories was in essence a scramble for national political power, the economic, political, legal and social roots of the sectional dispute are traced, and the causal connections between Dred Scott and the coming of the Civil War, among other causes, are clarified