Clarence Thomas facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Clarence Thomas
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Official portrait, 2007
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| Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States | |
| Assumed office October 23, 1991 |
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| Nominated by | George H. W. Bush |
| Preceded by | Thurgood Marshall |
| Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit | |
| In office March 12, 1990 – October 23, 1991 |
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| Nominated by | George H. W. Bush |
| Preceded by | Robert Bork |
| Succeeded by | Judith W. Rogers |
| Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission | |
| In office May 6, 1982 – March 8, 1990 |
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| President | Ronald Reagan George H. W. Bush |
| Preceded by | Eleanor Holmes Norton |
| Succeeded by | Evan Kemp |
| Assistant Secretary of Education for the Office for Civil Rights | |
| In office June 26, 1981 – May 6, 1982 |
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| President | Ronald Reagan |
| Preceded by | Cynthia Brown |
| Succeeded by | Harry Singleton |
| Personal details | |
| Born | June 23, 1948 Pin Point, Georgia, U.S. |
| Spouses |
Kathy Ambush
(m. 1971; div. 1984)Virginia Lamp
(m. 1987) |
| Children | 1 |
| Education | |
| Signature |  |
Clarence Thomas (born June 23, 1948) is an American lawyer and jurist who has served since 1991 as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. President George H. W. Bush nominated him to succeed Thurgood Marshall. After Marshall, Thomas is the second African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court and has been its longest-serving member since Anthony Kennedy's retirement in 2018. He has also been the Court's oldest member since Stephen Breyer retired in 2022.
Thomas was born in Pin Point, Georgia. After his father abandoned the family, he was raised by his grandfather in a poor Gullah community near Savannah, Georgia. Growing up as a devout Catholic, Thomas originally intended to be a priest in the Catholic Church but became dissatisfied with its efforts to combat racism and abandoned his aspiration to join the clergy. He graduated with honors from the College of the Holy Cross in 1971 and earned his Juris Doctor in 1974 from Yale Law School. Upon graduating, he was appointed as an assistant attorney general in Missouri and later entered private practice there. He became a legislative assistant to U.S. Senator John Danforth in 1979, and was made Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education in 1981. President Ronald Reagan appointed Thomas as Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) the next year.
President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1990. He served in that role for 19 months before filling Marshall's seat on the Supreme Court.
Since the death of Antonin Scalia, Thomas has been the Court's foremost originalist, stressing the original meaning in interpreting the U.S. Constitution. In contrast to Scalia—who had been the only other consistent originalist—he pursues a more classically liberal variety of originalism. Until 2020, Thomas was known for his silence during most oral arguments, though has since begun asking more questions to counsel. He is notable for his majority opinions in Good News Club v. Milford Central School (determining the freedom of religious speech in relation to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (affirming the individual right to bear arms outside the home). He is widely considered to be the Court's most conservative member.
Contents
Early life
Thomas was born on June 23, 1948, in his parents' wooden shack in Pin Point, Georgia. Pin Point was a small community near Savannah founded by freedmen in the 1880s. He was the second of three children of M.C. Thomas, a farm worker, and Leola Williams. Williams had been born out of wedlock; after her mother's death, she was sent from Liberty County, Georgia, to live with an aunt in Pin Point. The family were descendants of enslaved people and spoke Gullah as a first language. Thomas's earliest known ancestors were slaves named Sandy and Peggy, who were born in the late 18th century and owned by wealthy planter Josiah Wilson of Liberty County. Thomas's older sister, Emma, was born in 1946, and his younger brother, Myers, in 1949.
Upon becoming pregnant with Thomas's older sister, Leola was expelled from her Baptist church and dropped out of high school after the 10th grade; her father ordered her to marry M.C. in January 1947. After three years of marriage, M.C. sued for divorce, claiming that Leola neglected the children, and a judge granted the request in March 1951. After the divorce, M.C. moved to Savannah and later Pennsylvania, visiting his children only once. Leola went to work as a maid in Savannah during the week and returned to Pin Point on the weekends. Custody of the children was awarded to Leola's aunt. When her aunt's house burned down in 1955, Leola took her children to live with her in the room she rented in a tenement with an outdoor toilet in Savannah, leaving her daughter with the aunt in Pin Point. Finding herself unable to raise two little boys by herself, and unable to get public assistance because her father was wealthy, she asked her father, Myers Anderson, for help. He initially refused but agreed after his wife threatened to throw him out.
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Thomas and his brother went to live with Anderson and his wife in 1955 and experienced amenities such as indoor plumbing and regular meals for the first time. Despite having little formal education, Anderson had built a successful business delivering coal, oil, and ice. He converted to Catholicism, and sent Thomas to be educated at a series of Catholic schools. Thomas attended the predominantly black St. Pius X High School in Chatham County for two years before transferring to St. John Vianney's Minor Seminary on the Isle of Hope, where he was the segregated boarding school's first black student. Though he experienced hazing, he performed well academically. He spent many hours at the Carnegie Library, the only library for blacks in Savannah before libraries were desegregated in 1961.
When racial unrest led to widespread protest and marches in Savannah from 1960 to 1963, Anderson used his wealth to bail out demonstrators and took his grandchildren to meetings promoted by the NAACP.
When Thomas was ten years old, Anderson began putting his grandsons to work during the summers, helping him build a house on a plot of farmland he owned, building fences, and doing farm work. He believed in hard work and self-reliance, never showed his grandsons affection, beat them frequently according to Leola, and impressed the importance of a good education on them. Anderson taught Thomas that "all of our rights as human beings came from God, not man", and that racial segregation was a violation of divine law.
Education
During his freshman year from 1967 to 1968, Thomas attended Conception Seminary College, a Catholic seminary in Missouri, with the intent to become a priest; no one in Thomas's family had attended college before. After Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, he thought the church did not do enough to combat racism and resolved to abandon the priesthood. He left the seminary at the end of the semester.
At a nun's suggestion, Thomas enrolled at the College of the Holy Cross, an elite Catholic college in Massachusetts, as a sophomore transfer student on a full academic scholarship. He was one of the college's first black students, being one of 20 recruited by President John E. Brooks in 1968 in a group that also included future attorney Ted Wells, running back Eddie Jenkins, Jr., and novelist Edward P. Jones. Without financial support from his grandfather, Thomas defrayed his expenses by working as a waiter and dishwasher in the college's dining hall. He later recalled, "I was 19. My only hope was Holy Cross College".
Professors at Holy Cross remembered Thomas as a determined, diligent student. He kept to a strict routine of studying alone and stayed back during holidays to continue working. Thomas C. Lawler, an English professor at Holy Cross, recalled him as having "never talked very much in class. He was the kind of person you really might not notice". By contrast, he was outspoken at BSU meetings, distinguishing himself as a contrarian who often feuded with Ted Wells. Future NFL running back Ed Jenkins, a BSU member, said Thomas "could turn on a dime and reduce you to intellectual rubble". Edward P. Jones, who lived across from Thomas as a sophomore, reflected that "there was a fierce determination I sensed from him [Thomas], that he was going to get as much as he could and get as far, ultimately, as he could".
Thomas became a vocal student activist as an undergraduate. He became acquainted with Black separatism, the Black Muslim Movement, the Black power movement, helped draft the Black Student Union (BSU), and displayed a poster of Malcolm X in his dormitory room. When some black students were disproportionately punished in comparison with white students for the same violation, he suggested a walkout in protest. The BSU adopted his idea, and Thomas, along with 60 other black students, departed campus. Some of the priests negotiated with the protesting black students to reenter the school. When administrators granted amnesty to all protesters, Thomas returned to the college, later also to attend anti-war marches. In April 1970, he participated in the violent 1970 Harvard Square riots. He has credited his protests for his turn toward conservatism and subsequent disillusionment with leftist movements.
Having struggled with English as a native speaker of Gullah, Thomas chose to major in English literature. He became a member of Alpha Sigma Nu, the Jesuit honor society, and the Purple Key Society, of which he was the only black member. The college's focus on a liberal arts education introduced him to the writings of black intellectuals such as Richard Wright, whose literary works Thomas sympathized with. He also admired Malcolm X and recalled reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X to the point of wearing down the pages of his copy.
Thomas graduated on June 4, 1971, with a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, ranked ninth in his class. He applied to and was accepted by Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. That same year, Thomas matriculated at Yale Law School as one of 12 black students. Yale offered him the best financial aid package, and he was attracted to the civil rights activism of some of its faculty members. Finding it difficult to keep up with the school's expectations, he struggled to connect with other students who came from upper-class backgrounds. He enrolled in the most difficult courses and became a student of property law scholar Quintin Johnstone, who became his favorite professor. Johnstone remembered Thomas as having "performed very well". Dean Guido Calabresi described him and fellow student Hillary Clinton as "both excellent students [who] had the same kind of reputation".
Thomas obtained his Juris Doctor on May 20, 1974. After graduation, he sought to enter private practice as a corporate lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia. He has said that the law firms he applied to did not take his degree seriously, assuming he obtained it because of affirmative action. According to Thomas, the law firms also "asked pointed questions, unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated". In his 2007 memoir, he wrote: "I peeled a fifteen-cent sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it on the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I'd made by going to Yale. I never did change my mind about its value." Hill, Jones, and Farrington, the Savannah law firm where Thomas had interned the previous summer, offered him a job upon graduation, but he declined.
Early legal career
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With no job offers from major law firms, Thomas took a position as an associate with Missouri attorney general John Danforth, who offered him the prospect of practicing what he liked. Thomas moved to Saint Louis to study for the Missouri bar, and was admitted on September 13, 1974. He remained financially destitute even after leaving Yale, trying unsuccessfully on one occasion to make money by selling his blood at a blood bank, and hoped that by working for Danforth he might later acquire a job in private practice.
From 1974 to 1977, Thomas was an assistant attorney general of Missouri—the only African-American member of Danforth's staff. He worked first in the office's criminal appeals division and later in the revenue and taxation division. Thomas conducted lawsuits independently, gaining a reputation as a fair but controversial prosecutor. Years later, after he joined the Supreme Court, Thomas recalled his position in Missouri as "the best job I've ever had".
When Danforth was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976, Thomas left to become an attorney in Monsanto's legal department in Saint Louis. He found the job unsatisfying, so left to rejoin Danforth in Washington, D.C., as a legislative assistant. From 1979 to 1981, he handled energy issues for the Senate Commerce Committee. Thomas, who had switched his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican while working for Danforth in Missouri, soon drew the attention of officials in the newly elected Reagan Administration as a Black conservative. Pendleton James, Reagan's personnel director, offered Thomas the position of assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education. Initially reluctant, Thomas agreed after Danforth and others pressed him to take the post.
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President Ronald Reagan nominated Thomas as assistant secretary of education for the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) on May 1, 1981. The Senate received the nomination on May 28, 1981, and Thomas was quickly confirmed before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee on June 19, succeeding Cynthia Brown at the age of 32. He held the position for a brief period before James offered him a new position as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a promotion that Thomas believed, as with his position in the OCR, was because of his race. After James consulted the President, Thomas hesitantly took up the chair with Reagan's approval.
Thomas chaired the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) from 1982 to 1990. As chairman, he was tasked with enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in an agency that had been mutually resented by both Democrats and Republicans. He announced a reorganization of the EEOC and upgraded its record-keeping under an uncompromising leadership that eschewed racial quotas. Concerned by the EEOC's limited statutory authority, Thomas sought to impose criminal penalties for employers who practiced employment discrimination, moving to shift funding towards agency investigators. Though he had been critical of affirmative action, Thomas also opposed the Reagan Administration's agenda to remove affirmative action policies, believing it to be a detraction from socioeconomic issues.
During Thomas's tenure, settlement award amounts to victims of discrimination tripled, while the number of suits filed decreased. The EEOC's lack of the use of goals and timetables drew criticism from civil rights advocates, who lobbied representatives to review the EEOC's practices; Thomas testified before Congress more than 50 times. Near the end of his final term, the EEOC came under congressional scrutiny for the mishandling of age-discrimination cases.
District of Columbia Court of Appeals
In early 1989, President George H. W. Bush expressed interest in nominating Thomas to a federal judgeship. Thomas, now at age 41, initially rejected the position, believing himself unready to make a lifetime commitment to being a judge. White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray and White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu advocated for his nomination, and Judge Laurence Silberman advised Thomas to accept an appointment. Anticipating Thomas's nomination, a liberal coalition—including the Alliance for Justice and the National Organization for Women (NOW)—emerged to oppose his candidacy.
On October 30, 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to fill the seat vacated by Robert Bork. Thomas gained the support of other African American officials, including former transportation secretary William Coleman, and said that when meeting white Democratic staffers in the United States Senate, he was "struck by how easy it had become for sanctimonious whites to accuse a black man of not caring about civil rights".
In February 1990, the Senate Judiciary Committee recommended Thomas by a vote of 12 to 1. On March 6, 1990, the Senate confirmed him to the Court of Appeals by a vote of 98 to 2. He developed cordial relationships during his 19 months on the federal court, including with Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg. During his judgeship, Thomas authored 19 opinions.
Nomination to the Supreme Court
When Justice William Brennan retired from the Supreme Court in July 1990, Thomas was Bush's favorite among the five candidates on his shortlist for the position. However, Bush's advisors, including Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, considered Thomas inexperienced, and he instead nominated David Souter of the First Circuit Court of Appeals. A year later, Justice Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement on June 27, 1991, and Bush nominated Thomas to replace him. Bush announced his selection on July 1, calling Thomas the "best qualified at this time". Thornburgh cautioned Bush that replacing Marshall with any candidate who was not perceived to share Marshall's views would make confirmation difficult.
Liberal interest groups sought to challenge Thomas's nomination by paralleling the same strategy used against Robert Bork's confirmation. Republican officials in turn emphasized his personal history and gathered support from African American interest groups, including the NAACP. Other civil rights organizations, such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Urban League, were convinced not to oppose Thomas, believing that he was Bush's last black nominee. On July 31, 1991, the board of directors of the NAACP voted against endorsing Thomas, announcing their opposition to his confirmation the same day.
The American Bar Association (ABA) appraised Thomas as "qualified" for the Supreme Court. The result came in contrast to the "well qualified" rating some nominees had received previously. The Bush Administration anticipated that the organization would rate Thomas more poorly than it thought he deserved, so pressured the ABA for at least the mid-level qualified rating while simultaneously discrediting it as partisan. Opponents of Thomas's nomination saw the assessment as indicating that he was unfit for the Court. The ABA gave Thomas its highest rankings in integrity and judicial temperament and a middle-grade in professional competence.
On September 10, 1991, formal confirmation hearings began before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Thomas testified for 25 hours, the second-longest of any Supreme Court nominee. He was reticent when answering senators' questions, recalling what had happened to Robert Bork when Bork expounded on his judicial philosophy during his confirmation hearings four years earlier. As many of his earlier writings frequently referenced natural law, his views on the legal theory became a focus of the hearings. Thomas said he regarded natural law as a "philosophical background" to the Constitution.
Ninety witnesses testified in favor of or against Thomas. A motion on September 27, 1991, to give the nomination a favorable recommendation failed 7–7, and the Judiciary Committee voted 13–1 to send it to the full Senate without recommendation.
Senate votes
On October 15, 1991, the Senate voted to confirm Thomas as an associate justice, 52–48. Thomas received the votes of 41 Republicans and 11 Democrats, while 46 Democrats and two Republicans voted to reject his nomination. As of 2024[update], Thomas is the most recent Supreme Court justice to be confirmed by a Senate controlled by the opposing party of the appointing president.
The 99 days during which Thomas's nomination was pending in the Senate was the second-longest of the 16 nominees receiving a final vote since 1975, second only to Bork's 108 days. The vote to confirm Thomas was the narrowest margin for approval in more than 100 years.
Thomas received his commission on October 23 and took the prescribed constitutional and judicial oaths of office, becoming the Court's 106th justice. He was sworn in by Justice Byron White in a ceremony initially scheduled for October 21, which was postponed because of the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist's wife, Natalie. His first set of law clerks included future judges Gregory Katsas and Gregory Maggs and U.S. Ambassador Christopher Landau.
| Vote to confirm the Thomas nomination | |||
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| October 15, 1991 | Party | Total votes | |
| Democratic | Republican | ||
| Yea | 11 | 41 | 52 |
| Nay | 46 | 2 | 48 |
| Result: Confirmed | |||
Supreme Court of the United States
After joining the Supreme Court, Thomas emerged as a member of the Court's conservative wing. He aligned himself with Justice Antonin Scalia, with whom he shared an originalist approach to constitutional interpretation, and sided with him in 92 percent of cases during his first 13 years on the bench. Over time, Thomas and Scalia's jurisprudence separated, with Thomas favoring stronger emphasis on the Constitution's original understanding and demonstrating greater willingness to overrule precedent. His appointment represented a decline in the Court's liberal wing, which then comprised only Justices John Paul Stevens and Harry Blackmun.
In his early days on the Court, Thomas adopted a bold style of legal jurisprudence that alienated him from Justices Blackmun and Sandra Day O'Connor. He became the subject of intense media criticism for his decisions, including from figures that supported his appointment. Having previously experienced scrutiny during his confirmation hearings, Thomas believed in producing results without regard for his public image, a characteristic embodied in his lack of questions during oral arguments. His conservative approach moved O'Connor to take liberal positions but attracted Scalia. He formed a friendship with Justice Byron White, with whom he shared multiple interests, and found support from Justice David Souter.
Thomas is a proponent of original meaning, incorporating what had been Scalia's narrower approach to the doctrine and the original intent of the Framers of the Constitution, including those espoused in the Declaration of Independence. As a means to impartiality, he is an advocate of judicial restraint to limit judicial discretion. Thomas has been the most-willing of all justices on the Court to overrule precedent; according to Scalia, "he does not believe in stare decisis, period". By October 1, 2012, he had written 475 opinions, including 171 majority opinions, 138 concurrences, and 166 dissenting opinions—approximately 10 percent of the 1,772 cases the Court had decided since he was elevated. In 2016, Thomas wrote nearly twice as many opinions as any other justice.
Thomas has been called the most conservative member of the Supreme Court, though others gave Scalia that designation while they served on the Court together. Thomas's influence, particularly among conservatives, was perceived to have significantly increased during Donald Trump's presidency, and Trump appointed many of his former clerks to political positions and judgeships. As the Supreme Court became more conservative, Thomas and his legal views became more influential on the Court. This influence increased further by 2022, with Thomas authoring an opinion expanding Second Amendment rights. He was also the most senior associate justice by that time.
Government powers and legal structure
Court precedent
Thomas believes the Court should not follow erroneous precedent, a view not currently held by other justices. He has called to reconsider New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), and criticized Gideon v. Wainwright (1963). At a 2013 Federalist Society dinner, Judge Diane S. Sykes asked Thomas whether "stare decisis doesn't hold much force for you?" He responded, "Oh, it sure does, but not enough to keep me from going to the Constitution". In 2019, The New York Times reported that data gathered by political scientist Stephen L. Wasby of the University at Albany found that Thomas wrote "more than 250 concurring or dissenting opinions seriously questioning precedents, calling for their reconsideration or suggesting that they be overruled".
In the 2010 gun regulation case McDonald v. City of Chicago, Thomas sought to repeal past precedents and insisted that "stare decisis is only an 'adjunct' of our duty as judges to decide by our best lights what the Constitution means". In Gamble v. United States (2019), he joined the majority opinion, which revisited an exception to the Double Jeopardy Clause, writing separately to state his position against the Court's prevailing view of multi-factor analysis regarding whether to follow precedent:
In my view, if the Court encounters a decision that is demonstrably erroneous—i.e., one that is not a permissible interpretation of the text—the Court should correct the error, regardless of whether other factors support overruling the precedent. Federal courts may (but need not) adhere to an incorrect decision as precedent, but only when traditional tools of legal interpretation show that the earlier decision adopted a textually permissible interpretation of the law. A demonstrably incorrect judicial decision, by contrast, is tantamount to making law, and adhering to it both disregards the supremacy of the Constitution and perpetuates a usurpation of the legislative power.
In Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt (2019), Thomas wrote the 5–4 decision overruling Nevada v. Hall (1979), which said states could be sued in courts of other states. In his majority opinion, he noted that stare decisis "is not an inexorable command". Thomas explicitly disavowed the concept of reliance interests as justification for adhering to precedent.
Executive power
Thomas has supported a broad interpretation of executive power and has theorized about its constitutional aspects. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), he dissented from the majority opinion, arguing that courts should have had complete deference to the executive decision to determine that Yaser Esam Hamdi was an enemy combatant. He wrote in Hamdi that the president does not have the singular authority to detain a citizen who was captured while in enemy service. In addition, Thomas noted that "structural advantages [of the Presidency] are most important in the national-security and foreign-affairs contexts" and thus "the Founders intended that the President have primary responsibility—along with the necessary power—to protect the national security and to conduct the nation's foreign relations".
Thomas was one of three justices to dissent in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), which concerned whether the president can establish military tribunals to try detained enemy combatants for war crimes conspiracy. As in Hamdi, he relied on The Federalist Papers in proposing that the president is responsible for protecting national security.
In Zivotofsky v. Kerry (2015), Thomas relied on the Articles of Confederation for his opinion. He wrote, "the President is not confined to those powers expressly identified in [the Constitution]", concluding that residual foreign affairs were vested in the president, not Congress. Rather than finding the original intent or original understanding, Thomas wrote in the case that he sought the "understanding of executive power [that] prevailed in America" at the time of the founding.
In the Ninth Circuit case East Bay Sanctuary Covenant v. Trump (2018), which placed an injunction on the Trump administration's asylum policy, Thomas dissented from a denial of stay application. The Ninth Circuit imposed an injunction on the Trump administration's policy granting asylum only to refugees entering from a designated port of entry, ruling that it violated the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Ninth Circuit Judge Jay Bybee's majority opinion concluded that denial of the ability to apply for asylum regardless of entry point is "the hollowest of rights that an alien must be allowed to apply for asylum regardless of whether she arrived through a port of entry if another rule makes her categorically ineligible for asylum based on precisely that fact." Gorsuch, Alito, Kavanaugh also dissented in the decision to deny a stay to the Ninth Circuit's injunction.
Federalism and states' rights
Thomas views federalism as a foundational limit on federal power. In interpreting congressional powers, he has defended strict constructionism—an approach Scalia rejected. On September 24, 1999, Thomas delivered the Dwight D. Opperman Lecture at Drake University Law School on "Why Federalism Matters", saying that it was an essential safeguard to protect "individual liberty and the private ordering of our lives". He also asserted that federalism enhances self-government, protects individual liberty by separating political power, and checks federal authority. According to law professor Ann Althouse, the Court has yet to move toward "the broader, more principled version of federalism propounded by Justice Thomas".
In the 1995 case U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, parties challenged the constitutionality of an amendment to the Arkansas Constitution that added age, citizenship, and residency requirements for congressional service. In a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled the amendment unconstitutional, also affirming the previous rulings of both the state's trial court and the Arkansas Supreme Court; Justice Stevens wrote for the majority. Thomas—joined by Justices Rehnquist, O'Connor, and Scalia—dissented in what is to date his lengthiest opinion. He argued that states could impose term limits on members of Congress, as state citizens are "the ultimate source of the Constitution's authority". That same year, Thomas concurred in United States v. Lopez, which invalidated the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 for going beyond the Commerce Clause. He opined that the Court had deviated "from the original understanding of the Commerce Clause" and that the substantial effects test, "if taken to its logical extreme, would give Congress a 'police power' over all aspects of American life".
In United States v. Comstock (2010), the Supreme Court, in a majority opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer, held that the Necessary and Proper Clause allows Congress to enact a law that authorized the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to detain a mentally ill and dangerous federal prisoner beyond the DOJ's original lawful date. Thomas's dissent, joined by Scalia, argued that the clause allows Congress only to execute enumerated powers. When the Court upheld the Affordable Care Act in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012), he authored a short dissent and joined the joint dissent finding the act completely unconstitutional.
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As of 2007, Thomas was the justice most willing to exercise judicial review of federal statutes but among the least likely to overturn state statutes. According to a New York Times editorial, "from 1994 to 2005 ... Justice Thomas voted to overturn federal laws in 34 cases and Justice Scalia in 31, compared with just 15 for Justice Stephen Breyer".
In Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, Thomas was the sole dissenter, voting to throw out Section Five of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Section Five requires states with a history of racial voter discrimination—mostly states from the old South—to gain Justice Department clearance when revising election procedures. Congress had reauthorized Section Five in 2006 for another 25 years, but Thomas said the law was no longer necessary, stating that the rate of black voting in seven Section Five states was higher than the national average. He wrote, "the violence, intimidation and subterfuge that led Congress to pass Section 5 and this court to uphold it no longer remains." He took this position again in Shelby County v. Holder, voting with the majority and concurring with the reasoning that struck down Section Five.
Individual rights
First Amendment
Thomas has generally written opinions in favor of protections for free speech. He has voted in favor of First Amendment claims in cases involving issues including campaign contributions and commercial speech. A 2002 study by Eugene Volokh found Thomas to be the justice second-most likely to uphold free speech claims (tied with Souter). He has ruled against laws regulating hate speech, as in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992), United States v. Stevens (2010), and Snyder v. Phelps (2011). Conversely, he has been reluctant to uphold speech deemed intimidating, as in Virginia v. Black (2003).
Thomas's first opinion on free speech was the 1995 case McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, finding that the Founding Era contained the expansive use of anonymous pamphlets and columns. Although he agreed with the result of Justice John Paul Stevens's majority opinion, he disagreed with its methodology and did not join it.
In Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee v. FEC (1996), the Supreme Court ruled against the decision of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to fine the Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee for running a political advertisement targeting Senator Tim Wirth. Thomas joined Justice Stephen Breyer's majority opinion in the case, but wrote separately to call against the framework established in the previous campaign finance case of Buckley v Valeo (1976):
I believe that contribution limits infringe as directly and as seriously upon freedom of political expression and association as do expenditure limits. The protections of the First Amendment do not depend upon so fine a line as that between spending money to support a candidate or group and giving money to the candidate or group to spend for the same purpose. In principle, people and groups give money to candidates and other groups for the same reason that they spend money in support of those candidates and groups: because they share social, economic, and political beliefs and seek to have those beliefs affect governmental policy.
Thomas has made public his belief that all limits on federal campaign contributions are unconstitutional and should be struck down. In Citizens United v. FEC (2010), Thomas joined the majority but dissented in part, arguing that the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act's disclaimer and disclosure requirements were unconstitutional. He reinforced his defense of anonymous speech in Doe v. Reed (2010), writing that the First Amendment protects "political association" by means of signing a petition.
In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), Justice Hugo Black dissented from the Court's opinion invalidating a school's policy to forbid students from wearing armbands in protest of the Vietnam War. Thomas endorsed Black's dissent in Morse v. Frederick (2007), concurring with narrowing the rationale of Tinker and arguing that Tinker be overruled as it was a constitutionally unsupported "sea change in students’ speech rights". In his view, the Constitution does not govern whether public school students may be disciplined for expressive behavior.
In Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Thomas joined the majority opinion that Texas's decision to deny a request for a Confederate Battle Flag specialty license plate was constitutional.
Fourth Amendment
In cases regarding the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, Thomas often favors police over defendants. For example, his opinion for the Court in Board of Education v. Earls upheld drug testing for students involved in extracurricular activities, and he wrote again for the Court in Samson v. California, permitting random searches on parolees. He dissented in Georgia v. Randolph, which prohibited warrantless searches that one resident approves and the other opposes, arguing that the Court's decision in Coolidge v. New Hampshire controlled the case. In Indianapolis v. Edmond, Thomas described the Court's extant case law as having held that "suspicionless roadblock seizures are constitutionally permissible if conducted according to a plan that limits the discretion of the officers conducting the stops." He expressed doubt that those cases were decided correctly but concluded that since the litigants in the case at bar had not briefed or argued that the earlier cases be overruled, he believed that the Court should assume their validity and rule accordingly. Thomas was in the majority in Kyllo v. United States, which held that the use of thermal imaging technology to probe a suspect's home without a warrant violated the Fourth Amendment.
In cases involving schools, Thomas has advocated greater respect for the doctrine of in loco parentis, which he defines as "parents delegat[ing] to teachers their authority to discipline and maintain order".
Sixth Amendment
In Doggett v. United States, the defendant had technically been a fugitive from the time he was indicted in 1980 until his arrest in 1988. The Court held that the delay between indictment and arrest violated Doggett's Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial, finding that the government had been negligent in pursuing him and that he was unaware of the indictment. Thomas dissented, arguing that the Speedy Trial Clause's purpose was to prevent "'undue and oppressive incarceration' and the 'anxiety and concern accompanying public accusation'" and that the case implicated neither. He cast the case instead as "present[ing] the question [of] whether, independent of these core concerns, the Speedy Trial Clause protects an accused from two additional harms: (1) prejudice to his ability to defend himself caused by the passage of time; and (2) disruption of his life years after the alleged commission of his crime". Thomas dissented from the court's decision to, as he saw it, answer the former in the affirmative. He wrote that dismissing the conviction "invites the Nation's judges to indulge in ad hoc and result-driven second guessing of the government's investigatory efforts. Our Constitution neither contemplates nor tolerates such a role".
In Garza v. Idaho, Thomas and Gorsuch, in dissent, suggested that Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), which required that indigent criminal defendants be provided counsel, was wrongly decided and should be overruled.
Fourteenth Amendment
Thomas believes the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids consideration of race, such as race-based affirmative action or preferential treatment. In Adarand Constructors v. Peña, he wrote, "there is a 'moral [and] constitutional equivalence' between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality. Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race."
In Gratz v. Bollinger, Thomas wrote, "a State's use of racial discrimination in higher education admissions is categorically prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause." In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, Thomas joined the opinion of Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote that "[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Concurring, Thomas wrote, "if our history has taught us anything, it has taught us to beware of elites bearing racial theories", and charged that the dissent carried "similarities" to the arguments of the segregationist litigants in Brown v. Board of Education.
Thomas joined the majority in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which struck down affirmative action in college admissions. He filed a concurring opinion, which he read from the bench, a rare practice for Supreme Court justices.
Oral arguments
During a 10-year period from February 2006 to February 2016, Thomas read his opinions from the bench but asked no questions during oral arguments. By May 2020, he had asked questions in two oral arguments since 2006 and had spoken during 32 of the roughly 2,400 arguments since 1991. Thomas has given many reasons for his silence, including self-consciousness about how he speaks, a preference for listening to those arguing the case, and difficulty getting in a word. He said in 2013 that it was "unnecessary in deciding cases to ask that many questions ... we should listen to lawyers who are arguing their cases, and I think we should allow the advocates to advocate." His speaking and listening habits may have been influenced by his Gullah upbringing, during which his English was relatively unpolished. In a 2017 paper in Northwestern University Law Review, RonNell Andersen Jones and Aaron L. Nielson wrote that while asking few questions, "in many ways, [Thomas] is a model questioner."
Thomas took a more active role in questioning when the Supreme Court shifted to holding teleconferenced arguments in May 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which the justices took turns asking questions in order of seniority. Since the court resumed in-person oral arguments at the beginning of the 2021 term, the justices agreed to allow Thomas to ask the first question of each lawyer following their opening statements.
Personal life
Family
In 1971, Thomas married Kathy Grace Ambush. The couple had one child, Jamal Adeen, born in 1973, who is Thomas's sole child. Thomas and his first wife separated in 1981 and divorced in 1984. In 1987, Thomas married Virginia Lamp, a lobbyist and aide to U.S. Representative Dick Armey. In 1997, they took in Thomas's six-year-old great-nephew, Mark Martin Jr., who had lived with his mother in Savannah public housing. Since 1999, Thomas and his wife have traveled across the U.S. in a motorcoach between Court terms.
Virginia "Ginni" Thomas has remained active in conservative politics, serving as a consultant to The Heritage Foundation and as founder and president of Liberty Central. In 2011, she stepped down from Liberty Central to open a conservative lobbying firm, touting her "experience and connections", meeting with newly elected Republican representatives and calling herself an "ambassador to the Tea Party". Also in 2011, 74 Democratic members of the House of Representatives wrote that Justice Thomas should recuse himself on cases regarding the Affordable Care Act because of "appearance of a conflict of interest" based on his wife's work.
The Washington Post reported in February 2021 that Ginni Thomas apologized to a group of Thomas's former clerks on the email listserv "Thomas Clerk World" for her role in contributing to a rift relating to "pro-Trump postings and former Thomas clerk John Eastman, who spoke at the rally and represented Trump in some of his failed lawsuits filed to overturn the election results". In March 2022, texts between Ginni Thomas and Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows from 2020 were turned over to the Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. The texts show Ginni Thomas repeatedly urging Meadows to overturn the election results and repeating conspiracy theories about ballot fraud. In response, 24 Democratic members of the House of Representatives and the Senate demanded that Thomas recuse himself from cases related to efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the January 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol on the grounds that Ginni Thomas's involvement in such efforts raised questions about his impartiality. An April 2022 Quinnipiac poll found that 52% of Americans agreed that, in light of Ginni Thomas's texts about overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election, Thomas should have recused himself from related cases.
Religion
Thomas was reconciled to the Catholic Church in the mid-1990s. In his autobiography, he criticized the church for failing to grapple with racism in the 1960s during the civil rights movement. As of 2021, Thomas is one of 14 practicing Catholic justices in the Court's history and one of six currently serving (along with Alito, Kavanaugh, Roberts, Sotomayor, and Barrett).
Literary influences
In 1975, when Thomas read economist Thomas Sowell's Race and Economics, he found an intellectual foundation for his philosophy. The book criticizes social reform by government and argues for individual action to overcome circumstances and adversity. Ayn Rand's works also influenced him, particularly The Fountainhead, and he later required his staffers to watch the 1949 film version of the novel. Thomas acknowledges "some very strong libertarian leanings", though he does not consider himself a libertarian.
Thomas has said novelist Richard Wright is the most influential writer in his life; Wright's books Native Son and Black Boy "capture[d] a lot of the feelings that I had inside that you learn how to repress". Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are Thomas's two favorite novels.
Nondisclosure of finances
In 2004, the Los Angeles Times reported that Thomas had accepted gifts from Harlan Crow, a wealthy Dallas-based real estate investor and prominent Republican donor, including a Bible that once belonged to abolitionist Frederick Douglass and a bust of Abraham Lincoln. Crow also gave Thomas a portrait of the justice and his wife, according to the painter, Sharif Tarabay. Crow's foundation gave $105,000 to Yale Law School, Thomas's alma mater, for the "Justice Thomas Portrait Fund", tax filings showed.
Spousal income and connections to cases has been redacted from the Justices' ethical disclosure forms. In 2011, Politico reported that Crow gave $500,000 to a Tea Party group founded by Thomas's wife and that Thomas had failed to report her income on his disclosure for more than a decade. Also that year, the advocacy group Common Cause reported that between 2003 and 2007, Thomas failed to disclose $686,589 in income his wife earned from The Heritage Foundation, instead reporting "none" where "spousal noninvestment income" would be reported on his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms. The next week, Thomas said the disclosure of his wife's income had been "inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions". He amended reports going back to 1989.
In April 2023, ProPublica reported that Thomas had "accepted luxury trips virtually every year" from Crow for two decades and failed to report them. They included flights on Crow's private jet, international cruises on Crow's superyacht, and stays at Crow's private resort in the Adirondacks and the private club Bohemian Grove. The Ethics in Government Act requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to annually disclose gifts they receive. Many elected officials criticized the appearance of impropriety, given Crow's donations to conservative causes and Republican candidates, and his service on the board of trustees for the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution, which have filed amicus briefs before the Supreme Court.
In May 2023, ProPublica reported that Crow had paid for private school tuition for Thomas's grandnephew, Mark Martin, of whom Thomas had legal custody. Thomas did not report the payments on his financial disclosure forms, while ethics law experts said that they were required to be disclosed as gifts. Mark Paoletta, a longtime friend of Thomas, said that Crow paid for one year each at Hidden Lake and Randolph-Macon Academy, which ProPublica estimated to be worth around $100,000. On the same day, The Washington Post reported that in January 2012 conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo had Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway's polling firm bill the Judicial Education Project $25,000, which her firm then paid to Ginni Thomas's firm, Liberty Consulting, for a total of $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012. Leo instructed Conway not to mention Thomas's name on the paperwork. The documents the newspaper reviewed did not indicate the nature of the work Thomas did for the Judicial Education Project or Conway's company. In 2012 the Judicial Education Project filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.
In 2023, The New York Times reported that a friend had paid for Thomas's Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon RV, purchased for $267,230 in 1999 (roughly equivalent to $469,000 in 2022). Anthony Welters, a former UnitedHealthcare executive and a close friend, lent Thomas the purchase price. In response to a Senate inquiry, Welters revealed that the loan was discharged in 2008, forgiving much of the original balance. A bank would have been unlikely to offer such a loan, given the Marathon's high capacity for customization, which can make used models difficult to appraise. Thomas had previously said that he "had scrimped and saved to afford the motor coach", according to the Times, and a friend, Armstrong Williams, said that Thomas had told him that "he saved up all his money to buy it". When the loan was forgiven, Thomas was required to disclose the money as a gift.
In June 2024, Thomas filed an amendment to his financial disclosure report for 2019 to include information he had "inadvertently omitted". The amendment disclosed that he had received food and lodging at a hotel in Bali and a private club in California from Harlan Crow in July 2019. He did not report travel to and from the destinations on private jets or the nine-day cruise on Crow's superyacht.
In 2023, both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Finance Committee opened investigations into Thomas's undisclosed gifts. The two committees found additional undisclosed travel on Crow's private jet and superyacht, including international trips in 2010 and domestic trips in 2017, 2019, and 2021. In 2023, in response to Thomas's nondisclosures, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats called on Chief Justice Roberts to open an investigation into Thomas's conduct. On December 21, 2024, Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee released a report revealing that Thomas had taken an additional two trips in 2021 paid for by Crow.
Fix the Court released an analysis showing that, over the 20 years beginning in 2004, Thomas had accepted gifts worth $4.2 million, based on reporting by ProPublica and others. It estimated that over the same 20 years, the other eight justices plus the eight retired or deceased justices received gifts worth roughly $600,000 combined.
On January 3, 2025, the U.S. Judicial Conference announced it would not refer Thomas to the Justice Department over ethics allegations, denying a request by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Ron Wyden of Oregon. U.S. District Judge Robert Conrad, the Conference Secretary of the Judicial Conference, cited legal uncertainty about the Conference's authority to make a criminal referral of a Supreme Court justice.
Honors and recognition
Thomas was awarded the 1992 Horatio Alger Award by the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans. In 2001, Thomas was awarded the Francis Boyer Award presented by the American Enterprise Institute. In 2012, Thomas received an honorary degree from the College of the Holy Cross, his alma mater. He was a member of the college's board of trustees in 1990, and also from 2004 to 2006. In 2020, Belmont Abbey College awarded him the Benedict Leadership Award for his devotion to the Catholic faith and government service.
See also
In Spanish: Clarence Thomas para niños
- List of African-American jurists
- List of African-American federal judges
- List of justices of the Supreme Court of the United States
- List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 10)
- List of United States Supreme Court justices by time in office
- United States Supreme Court cases during the Rehnquist Court
- United States Supreme Court cases during the Roberts Court
- Black conservatism in the United States
