Jed S. Rakoff replies:

As a leading Indian law attorney, Mr. Hughes is naturally pleased that some of Marshall’s statements ultimately proved helpful to the Indians—though “admittedly, nearly a century and a half” after huge damage had been done. But the sad fact is that in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia,

Marshall, instead of recognizing full Indian sovereignty, decreed that the Cherokee Nation should be wards of the federal executive, well knowing what that would mean when the Great White Father was Andrew Jackson. And it was only when the plaintiff was a white Protestant minister, rather than a native American, that Marshall, in Worcester v. Georgia, felt free to utter the words that, again much later, became helpful to Indians themselves. As Professor Paul Finkelman notes in his excellent new book, Supreme Injustice (2018), “Marshall’s years on the court also coincided with a relentless push to remove Indians from the eastern part of the United States . . . . Marshall’s decisions in [Cherokee Nation and Worcester] provided the legal basis for taking all land from Indians.” The fact that some of Marshall’s words were much later put to good use cannot erase the immediate practical effect of his Indian decisions, which ranged from ineffectual to devastating.