Mark your calendars: 150 years ago Tuesday, the Supreme Court issued a long, muddled opinion in Scott v. Sandford , which Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes later said was the Court’s greatest “self-inflicted wound.” The case was brought by Dred Scott (right), a Missouri slave. Chief Justice Roger Taney, writing for the Court, ruled that African-Americans are not citizens under the Constitution, and could not file suit in federal courts.

The Court also ruled that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories. The anniversary is being marked – not celebrated – in numerous ways, including events over the weekend in St. Louis, where the case originated. And next month, at Harvard Law School, professor Charles Ogletree’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice will stage a re-argument of the case, with the participation of Justice Stephen Breyer and D.C. Circuit senior judge Harry Edwards, among many others. “No decision in our history has done more to injure the reputation of the Court,” wrote the late Court scholar Bernard Schwartz, who put the Scott decision at the top of his list of the Court’s worst rulings.