Roosevelt protested the New York State Supreme Court’s decision that workman’s compensation was unconstitutional. He compared the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, quoting Lincoln to support his argument:

Have you forgotten what Lincoln wrote in his first inaugural; (in justifying the position he had repeatedly taken, that he would endeavor to secure a reversal of the Dred Scott decision—just as I wish this New York decision reversed):—“If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the (court) . . . people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”