Curtis, Benjamin R (Robbins) (1809–1874)

US lawyer and Supreme Court justice. Although he had once argued that a slave-owner should be able to restrain his slave when temporarily in a free state, he was one of the two justices who dissented in Scott v. Sandford (1857). Curtis argued that Dred Scott had acquired freedom by residing in free territory. When Curtis published his opinion prematurely, Chief Justice Taney revised his own to counter it; Curtis thus resigned.

He was born in Watertown, Massachusetts. From an old Massachusetts family, he was left fatherless as a youth and his mother had to help put him through Harvard College and Law School by running a students' boarding house. He entered a Boston relative's law firm and specialized in commercial law (1834–51). He was appointed to the US Supreme Court in 1851.After his resignation he took up his lucrative private practice and continued to argue many cases before the Supreme Court. On the approach of the US Civil War, he asked Massachusetts to repeal its law against the return of fugitive slaves, evidently in order to placate Southern states. During the war he attacked President Lincoln for suspending the writ of habeas corpus and for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves. His last moment on the public stage was as chief counsel of President Andrew Johnson in his impeachment trial.