Path to the Supreme Court
For ten years, from February 2006 to February 2016, Clarence Thomas did not ask a single question at oral argument, and the silence became the country's favorite fact about him. It was always the wrong fact. Across the same decade he wrote more than any of his colleagues, as he had in the decade before and would in the decade after: opinions of the Court, and, more consequentially, a long shelf of solo concurrences and dissents addressed to no majority then in existence. The standard account of his early years made him an echo of Antonin Scalia (§103); Scalia himself, by his biographer's report, said the difference was that his colleague did not believe in stare decisis at all. Then the Court changed, and position after position that Thomas had staked out alone, on guns, on race, on the administrative state, on the reach of substantive due process, became the law or the live question. Whatever else may be said of the 106th justice, and a great deal is said, the record does not describe a follower. It describes the most patient man in American law.
The distance he traveled has no parallel on the modern Court. He was born on June 23, 1948, in Pin Point, Georgia, a Gullah-speaking hamlet of a few hundred people founded by freed slaves on a tidal creek south of Savannah, where his mother, Leola, picked crab meat and cleaned houses. His father left when he was two. After a fire took the family's home, and after a Savannah tenement year of cold-water squalor, Leola sent Clarence and his younger brother to live with her father, Myers Anderson, a barely lettered man who had built a fuel-oil and ice delivery business, and his wife, Christine. Anderson put the boys to work on the truck and on the farm he carved out at Liberty County, fed them, schooled them with the nuns at Savannah's segregated Catholic schools, and told them, in the phrase that gave his grandson's memoir its spine, that the easy part of their childhood was over. Thomas has called him the greatest man he has ever known. The Church took the boy toward the priesthood: St. John Vianney, the minor seminary where he was among the first Black students, then Conception Seminary in Missouri. On the evening of April 4, 1968, he heard a white classmate greet the news that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot with the hope that he would die. Thomas quit the seminary, and for a long time the Church; his grandfather, unforgiving of quitters, put him out of the house.
Holy Cross took him that fall on scholarship. He helped found the college's Black Student Union, kept a picture of Malcolm X, and graduated cum laude in English in 1971; he married Kathy Ambush that June, and their son, Jamal, was born in 1973. At Yale Law School, class of 1974, he studied tax and business law and came away convinced that the degree of a Black graduate admitted in the affirmative-action era carried a discount in the eyes of the market, a conviction he memorialized, by his own account, with a 'fifteen-cent' price sticker fixed to the frame of his diploma. The Atlanta firms' interviews confirmed his suspicion, he felt, treating the Yale lawyer as a category rather than a candidate. The offer that changed his life came from a Republican: John Danforth, the attorney general of Missouri, hired him in 1974, and Thomas deliberately took assignments, criminal appeals and tax, with no racial dimension at all. He followed two years at Monsanto's law department, then Danforth again, now a senator, as a legislative aide working energy and environment. In Washington he emerged as something the press found exotic: a Black conservative, skeptical of busing, of quotas, and of the civil-rights establishment's diagnosis of his own life. The Reagan administration made him Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights in 1981 and, a year later, chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where he ran a workforce of thousands for eight years, professionalized a case-processing mess, and fought running battles over his preference for individual relief above class-wide, statistical remedies. His marriage ended in 1984, and he raised Jamal; in 1987 he married Virginia Lamp, a labor lawyer and lobbyist from Omaha. In 1989 President Bush named him to the D.C. Circuit, and the Senate confirmed him 98 to 2 in March 1990.
Sixteen months later, on July 1, 1991, at Kennebunkport, Bush presented him as his choice for the seat of the retiring Thurgood Marshall (§96), calling him 'best qualified at this time,' a superlative even supporters winced at; the American Bar Association rated him qualified rather than well qualified. The September hearings were contentious but survivable: twenty-five hours of testimony, long exchanges on natural law, a Judiciary Committee that split seven to seven and sent the nomination to the floor without recommendation. Then, on October 6, NPR's Nina Totenberg and Newsday's Timothy Phelps reported the contents of a confidential statement by Anita Hill, a University of Oklahoma law professor who had worked for Thomas at the Education Department and the EEOC. The hearings reopened five days later before an enormous national television audience. Hill testified that Thomas had repeatedly pressed her to go out with him and had turned office conversations to pornography and to his own sexual prowess, describing the remarks in explicit detail; four friends testified that she had told them of the conduct at the time; a second former employee with a similar account was deposed but never called to testify in public. Thomas denied everything, categorically: 'I deny each and every single allegation against me today that suggested in any way that I had conversations of a sexual nature or about pornographic material with Anita Hill.' He called the proceeding 'a circus' and 'a national disgrace,' and then, in the sentence that ended the fight, 'a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas': 'You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.' Panels of women who had worked beside him testified that the man described was not the man they knew. The country divided and has never undivided; polls at the time sided with Thomas, and the retellings since have sided with Hill; this chapter records the transcript rather than adjudicating it. On October 15, 1991, the Senate confirmed him 52 to 48, eleven Democrats in favor, the narrowest margin in more than a century, and on October 23 he took his seat, the second Black justice, forty-three years old.
On the Supreme Court
The early caricature wrote him off as Scalia's quieter half. The opinions were already saying otherwise. In Adarand v. Pena (1995), concurring in the judgment on federal affirmative action, he set out the creed his race jurisprudence has never varied from: 'That these 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.' 'Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law.' Racial preference, he wrote, was a paternalism 'at war with the principle of inherent equality that underlies and infuses our Constitution.' His Grutter dissent in 2003 opened by quoting Frederick Douglass's plea that white America simply do nothing with the Negro, and argued that elite schools were entitled to their exclusivity or their racial engineering but not both. The method beneath the positions was an originalism harder-edged than Scalia's: where the text and the founding history pointed one way and precedent another, Thomas would say so, alone if necessary, and file the opinion as a marker for a Court that did not yet exist.
The markers matured. His solitary complaints that the Second Amendment had become 'this Court's constitutional orphan' ripened into New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), his biggest majority, which struck New York's century-old carry-permit regime and made consistency with 'this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation' the constitutional test. His lone McDonald concurrence (2010) would have revived the Privileges or Immunities Clause that the Slaughter-House Cases buried in 1873, a position that has migrated from eccentricity to syllabus. His Kelo dissent defended the poor neighborhoods that eminent domain actually takes. His campaign against judicial deference to agencies ran years ahead of the Court that eventually overruled Chevron. And when Dobbs overruled Roe, his concurrence declined to pretend the logic stopped there: 'in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.' No colleague joined that sentence; on the record of the last thirty years, that has never told us much about where the Court ends up. The famous silence, meanwhile, was a choice, not an absence: he thought the modern argument a scrum that served advocates badly, and when the pandemic forced the Court into orderly, justice-by-justice telephone rounds in 2020, he asked the first question in nearly every case and kept the habit when the courtroom reopened. The ten-year gap ended on February 29, 2016, sixteen days after Scalia's death, as if the seat beside him going quiet had ended an argument only the two of them could hear.
The last years have put him at the center of the ethics wars, and the chapter states the record both ways. In 2023 ProPublica reported two decades of undisclosed generosity from the Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow: private-jet and yacht travel, resort vacations, the purchase of Savannah properties including the house where Thomas's mother lived, and tuition for the grandnephew the Thomases raised. Thomas responded that the Crows were dear friends, that he had been advised such personal hospitality from someone with no business before the Court need not be disclosed, and he amended certain filings; critics answered that the property deal and tuition were never hospitality at all. His wife's political work became a second front: in 2022 it was reported that Virginia Thomas had sent Mark Meadows dozens of texts urging the fight to overturn the 2020 election result, and she acknowledged attending the January 6 morning rally; she has said her activism is her own and that the couple keep their professional lives separate. Thomas recused from none of the election cases, and when the Court let the January 6 committee obtain White House records in January 2022, he was the only justice to note a dissent. Congress and the commentariat have judged all of this variously; the chapter records it and moves on, as he conspicuously has.
By the Supreme Court Database's coding, as computed for this site, he has cast a liberal vote in 32.2 percent of 2,755 cases, the most cases of any sitting justice, against a 49.5 percent average for the colleagues on the same cases: a seventeen-point gap, the widest on the sitting Court, and the second most conservative record of the thirty-three justices the site's panel ranks, behind only Rehnquist (§100). The same series measures his drift across thirty-four terms at six tenths of a point, which is to say it measures essentially none. This site's coding of the 2025 term shows the workhorse unretired: six opinions of the Court, from Chevron USA v. Plaquemines Parish, decided without a dissent, to the 5 to 4 Postal Service v. Konan, alongside four solo dissents, in Trump v. Cook, Hunter v. United States, FCC v. AT&T, and the tariff case, where he also joined Kavanaugh's (§114) principal dissent; and, in the term's strangest lineup, he joined Sotomayor's (§111) five-justice majority in T.M. v. University of Maryland Medical System, the sort of pairing his jurisprudence of rules over reputations occasionally produces.
He is the longest-serving member of the Court, and should he still be sitting in the spring of 2028 he will pass William O. Douglas as the longest-serving justice in its history: the poorest-born member of the modern Court, holder of its most contested seat, survivor of its ugliest confirmation, author of its longest game. The two verdicts on him have never converged and will not soon: to his critics he is the Court's id, indifferent to precedent, ethics norms, and the country's settled expectations; to his admirers he is its conscience, the one justice who writes as if the Constitution's text were the only client. Both camps now argue on ground he prepared, mostly alone, over three decades in which he was told, year after year, that he was silent. He continues to serve.
The Voting Record
How Thomas voted in the 2,755 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1991 term through the 2024 term, using that database’s classification of each vote as liberal or conservative. The gold tick on each bar is the rate for the other justices sitting on those same cases.
Across the whole career Thomas voted with Scalia more than with anyone else — the same side of the judgment in 84.1% of their 1,154 divided cases — and with Stevens least, at 20.5%. See the matrices →Compared against the 13 colleagues Thomas shared at least 300 divided cases with.
And Thomas barely moved: 0.6 points between the first five terms and the last, which is less than the year-to-year noise — one of the most fixed records on the modern Court. See who changed →
How conservative is Thomas? The full ideology profile: the record measured, the bloc mapped, and the 28 cases where Thomas broke from it.
Source · The Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.) · how these figures are made
Key Decisions
New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen
2022Holding · Gun regulations are constitutional only if consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation; New York's restrictive licensing scheme fails that test.
Role · Thomas wrote for the Court.
Remade Second Amendment litigation nationwide and marked the arrival of Thomas's long-held method at the center of the law.
Read the opinion →Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization
2022Holding · (Concurring) The Court should reconsider its substantive-due-process precedents, including those on contraception and same-sex marriage.
Role · Thomas joined the majority ending the right to abortion and wrote separately urging a broader reexamination.
A signal of how far Thomas would carry the logic of Dobbs — the boldest statement of his willingness to revisit settled precedent.
Read the opinion →McDonald v. City of Chicago
2010Holding · (Concurring) The Second Amendment binds the states — and the right should rest on the Fourteenth Amendment's long-neglected Privileges or Immunities Clause.
Role · Thomas concurred alone on the Privileges or Immunities ground.
A characteristic Thomas opinion, urging the Court to return to constitutional first principles the majority preferred to avoid.
Read the opinion →Grutter v. Bollinger
2003Holding · (Dissenting) The Court upheld race-conscious law school admissions 5–4; Thomas, opening with Frederick Douglass, argued the Constitution forbids racial classifications in admissions outright.
Role · Thomas wrote a principal dissent, joined in large part by Scalia (§103).
The fullest statement of his race jurisprudence between Adarand and the 2023 SFFA decision that adopted much of its position.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
Clarence Thomas is the longest-serving member of the current Court and, after decades in dissent and concurrence, the intellectual leader of its resurgent conservative majority — a justice whose once-lonely positions have increasingly become the law. Born into rural poverty in segregated Georgia and raised by a stern grandfather whose example anchors his memoir, he rose through Holy Cross and Yale Law to head the EEOC before George H. W. Bush named him in 1991 to succeed Thurgood Marshall (§96). His confirmation became a national trauma when Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment; he denounced the hearings as a 'high-tech lynching' and was confirmed by the narrowest margin in a century. On the bench he embraced an uncompromising originalism — often more thoroughgoing than Scalia's (§103) — willing to revisit long-settled precedent, and he wrote the Court's decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, remaking Second Amendment law around history and tradition. Corey Robin's Enigma is the most illuminating study of his thought; his own My Grandfather's Son tells the story from within. Begin with Robin and the memoir, then read Bruen, and reckon with the confirmation that still divides the country.
The Bookshelf
The most illuminating single book on how Thomas thinks, and a serious attempt to take his ideas seriously. Robin, writing from the left, argues that Thomas is best understood through a lifelong black nationalism and deep pessimism about white America — commitments that, he contends, drive Thomas's conservatism on race, rights, and self-reliance. Provocative and widely debated, it treats Thomas not as a cipher or a follower but as an original and coherent thinker, and it is the best starting point for understanding a justice too often caricatured. Metropolitan Books.
The first comprehensive biography — a sympathetic full-length life covering the Georgia childhood, the seminary, Yale, the EEOC, and the confirmation. Superseded in nuance by later books but the pioneering account. Encounter Books.
A balanced journalistic biography by an Atlanta reporter who interviewed Thomas and those around him — strong on the Pin Point, Georgia origins and the long road to the Court. William Morrow.
The richest biography — two Washington Post journalists on the anger, isolation, and racial complexity of a man who rose through institutions he distrusts. The best book on Thomas the person and what his story means. Doubleday.
The early study of Thomas's constitutional method — Gerber's argument that a coherent 'liberal originalism,' rooted in the natural-rights principles of the Declaration, runs through his opinions. Distinct from later, more conservative readings. New York University Press.
The fullest account of Thomas's originalism — Rossum on his willingness, unmatched on the Court, to discard precedent and return doctrine to the Constitution's original meaning, from the Commerce Clause to the Establishment Clause. University Press of Kansas.
The conservative brief for Thomas as the Court's most important originalist — Magnet's admiring argument that Thomas has spent decades trying to restore a 'lost Constitution' of limited government and natural rights. Encounter Books.
Thomas's own account of his life, and an indispensable and moving counterpart to the outside studies. He writes vividly of the poverty of coastal Georgia, the grandfather who raised him with unbending discipline, his passage through seminary and Yale, his disillusionments, and — in searing detail — the confirmation ordeal he experienced as a betrayal. Whatever one makes of his jurisprudence, the memoir explains the formation of the man: the resentments, the faith, and the fierce independence that shape the justice. Harper.
The most thorough investigative account of the 1991 confirmation and the Anita Hill hearings, by two distinguished journalists. Marshaling extensive reporting, it presents evidence the authors read as corroborating Hill's allegations and as revealing the campaign that secured Thomas's confirmation. It is pointedly critical and its conclusions are contested — Thomas has always denied the allegations, and readers should weigh it against his own account in My Grandfather's Son — but as a reconstruction of one of the most bitterly disputed episodes in modern Court history it is essential. Houghton Mifflin.
The landmark scholarly response to the 1991 hearings — essays edited by Toni Morrison on race, gender, and power in the Hill–Thomas confrontation, among the most-cited academic works on the episode. (John Greenya's Silent Justice, 2001, is a straightforward narrative alternative.) Pantheon Books.
Thomas's most consequential majority, and the fullest expression of his method. Striking down New York's restrictive handgun-licensing regime, he held that gun regulations are constitutional only if consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation — displacing the balancing tests lower courts had used and making history the decisive test. Building on Heller (§103), Bruen reshaped Second Amendment litigation across the country and touched off intense debate about how judges are to read the past. Read it as the arrival of Thomas's long-held approach at the center of American law.
The vindication of a lifelong dissent. When the Court struck down race-conscious college admissions, Thomas wrote a fifty-eight-page concurrence — the fullest statement of his conviction that the Constitution is colorblind and that affirmative action harms its intended beneficiaries — and read it from the bench, answering Justice Jackson (§116) directly. The argument he had made alone for thirty years, now the law. Free online.
The book edition of the 2020 documentary — thirty-plus hours of Thomas interviews including material the film never used. The closest thing to a second memoir, and the fullest record of how Thomas tells his own story beyond My Grandfather's Son. Regnery.
A sitting federal appellate judge's book-length defense of Thomas's jurisprudence, told through twelve cases and the ordinary litigants in them — the major sympathetic counterweight to Robin's Enigma on this shelf. Read them against each other. Regnery Gateway.
The standard modern biographical encyclopedia of the Court: a signed essay on each of the 110 justices from Jay to Alito, alphabetically arranged, by a named scholar or journalist. Length tracks reputation — two pages for Thomas Johnson, three for Woods, eleven for Holmes — which is itself a rough map of who the literature has bothered with. It is not a substitute for a biography, and for the justices who have never had one it is often the most careful short account in print. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The one-volume reference on the Court: more than a thousand signed entries on cases, doctrines, institutions and the justices, current to 2005. Cases and people share one alphabet, so a citation can be followed without changing volumes, and the biographical entries are short, written by specialists, and better than a longer sketch at carrying the historiography — what the argument about a justice currently is. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The Reading Path
A researched route through the literature — in order.
- 1.Robin, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas — for the most serious account of how he actually thinks
- 2.Thomas, My Grandfather's Son — for the formation of the man, in his own voice
- 3.New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen — for his originalist method at the center of the law
- 4.Mayer and Abramson, Strange Justice — for the contested confirmation (read against his memoir)
- 5.Merida & Fletcher, Supreme Discomfort — for the fullest portrait of the man and his anger
Where the Papers Are Kept
Thomas continues to serve on the Court, and his judicial papers have not been deposited or opened. For research, the Library of Congress holds the papers of many of his colleagues, and the manuscript collections of justices such as Blackmun (§98) illuminate the Court's inner workings during his tenure; the Federal Judicial Center and Oyez provide the essential biographical and case record. His own writings — the memoir and his opinions — are the primary source for his thought. Visit →
Online Resources
Ideas for Further Research
- The dissenter who won. For much of his career Thomas wrote alone, urging the Court to reconsider precedents most thought untouchable; on a more conservative Court many of those once-fringe positions have moved toward the center or become law. Trace a doctrine — the Second Amendment, administrative power, or substantive due process — from a solitary Thomas concurrence to a majority holding, and ask what his long game reveals about how legal change actually happens.
- Race, self-reliance, and the law. Thomas's views on race — his opposition to affirmative action, his emphasis on self-reliance, his skepticism of remedies premised on Black victimhood — are among the most debated in American public life, and Corey Robin locates their roots in black nationalism rather than simple conservatism. Study Thomas's race opinions alongside his biography, and set him against his predecessor Marshall (§96) to examine two profoundly different visions of how law should serve Black Americans.
- Precedent and the courage of one's convictions. Thomas is the justice most willing to say that a wrongly decided precedent should be overruled, however old or settled. Weigh the virtues and dangers of his stance on stare decisis — fidelity to the Constitution as he reads it versus the stability and reliance interests that precedent protects — and ask what a legal system gains and risks when a justice treats almost nothing as beyond reconsideration. Seat lineage: Thurgood Marshall §96 → Clarence Thomas → (still serving).