Clarence Thomas: life, ideas and books

Life

Clarence Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia. He graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in 1971 and from Yale Law School in 1974. He served as an assistant attorney general in Missouri, as a legislative assistant to Senator John Danforth, as Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education and, from 1982 to 1990, as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

He was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1990 to 1991. In 1991 President George H. W. Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court, and the Senate confirmed him 52 to 48 after hearings dominated by Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment, which he denied. His 2007 memoir, My Grandfather's Son, describes his upbringing and career.

Ideas

Thomas is an originalist who holds that the Constitution should be read according to its original public meaning, and he regards judicial restraint as the way to limit the discretion of judges. He has treated federalism as a foundational limit on federal power and is more willing than most of his colleagues to reconsider past decisions that he believes were wrongly decided. In Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt (2019) he wrote that stare decisis is not an inexorable command.

In national security matters he generally favours a broad view of executive power. He dissented in Gonzales v. Raich (2005), arguing that Congress could not reach private cultivation of marijuana for medical use. He wrote for the majority in Good News Club v. Milford Central School on religious speech and in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), which affirmed an individual right to bear arms outside the home.

Major works

• Good News Club v. Milford Central School (2001), majority opinion.
• Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt (2019), majority opinion.
• New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), majority opinion.
• My Grandfather's Son (2007), memoir.

Why conservatives read him

Thomas is widely regarded as the Court's most conservative justice and as a leading proponent of a thorough originalism. His separate opinions are often read as markers of where the Court may move, because he is willing to question doctrines that other justices accept. He has said that he was influenced by Harry Jaffa's reading of the Declaration of Independence and its natural-rights principles, and he is often named with Antonin Scalia as one of the two figures who shaped modern conservative jurisprudence.

His public story, from a segregated Georgia upbringing to the Court, also connects to the long tradition of Black self-reliance associated with Frederick Douglass and to the economics of Thomas Sowell, whose work he has cited as an influence. He remains a controversial figure in public debate, and readers should expect strongly differing evaluations of his record.