How Conservative Is Clarence Thomas?
The reputation, measured: every vote since 1991, his place in today’s bloc, and the 28 cases where he left it.
Very — and in his own particular way. Across 2,755 cases since 1991, 32.2% of Thomas’s coded votes were liberal, against 49.5% for the colleagues who sat on the same cases; of the 33 justices rankable since 1946, only William Rehnquist’s record is more conservative. But when today’s conservative bloc holds together without him — 28 times in the 2020 through 2024 terms — he is likelier to be standing to its right than crossing to the liberals, and he breaks in whole: 25 of the 28 were dissents, 10 of them his alone.
The record, against every justice since 1946
The Supreme Court Database codes each vote liberal or conservative, issue by issue, under definitions explained here. By that measure Thomas’s career liberal share is 32.2% — 17.3 points below the justices who sat on the very same cases. Among the 33 justices since 1946 with at least 500 coded votes, that places him 32nd most liberal — below Scalia (35.3%), below Alito (34.3%), above only Rehnquist (30.0%).
The record is most conservative where the docket is largest. In criminal procedure — 703 cases, his biggest single subject — 22.8% of his votes were liberal against a 46.2% baseline; in civil rights, 23.9% against 50.8%. Even his most liberal subject, federal taxation at 55.4%, sits well under its 73.5% baseline. And the line has barely moved: the drift series puts the gap between him and his colleagues just 0.6 points different at the end of three decades than at the beginning — a movement the record cannot tell from zero, across a Court that changed around him twice over.
Where he sits on the current Court
Agreement in divided cases, the 2020 through 2024 terms — how often each colleague was on Thomas’s side of the judgment when the Court split:
The bloc structure is not a pundit’s invention; it is visible in the numbers. Every Republican appointee agrees with Thomas in a majority of divided cases, from Alito at 79.5% down to the Chief Justice at 59.9% — and then the figure falls off a cliff, to 29.9% for Kagan and 20.0% for Jackson.
When he breaks from the bloc
Call it a break when the bloc was nearly whole and he was not: a divided case in which at least four of the other five Republican appointees voted together and Thomas voted the other way. That happened in 28 of the 125 such cases in the 2020 through 2024 terms — 22.4%, better than one in five.
Where? Criminal procedure above all — 9 of the 28, with First Amendment, civil rights and economic cases 4 apiece behind it. And in which direction? The database’s own coding answers: 17 of the 28 breaks produced a vote it codes conservative — the bloc to his left — against 9 coded liberal (2 fall in areas the database does not code). When Clarence Thomas leaves the most conservative bench in a century, he usually leaves it on the far side.
To the right of the bloc
The pattern is discipline, not temperament: rules he has stated once, applied without the softening his colleagues accept. He wrote the Court’s history-and-tradition test in Bruen; two terms later he was its lone dissenter in United States v. Rahimi, unwilling to let a federal disarmament statute survive on cobbled-together analogues — “not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue.” He has read the Confrontation Clause to reach only formal testimonial materials since 1992, so in Hemphill he stood alone on a threshold objection. He would discard the actual-malice rule of New York Times v. Sullivan — “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law” — and dissented accordingly in Counterman. In Mahanoy, the cheerleader case, he was the only justice willing to hold that schools’ historical in loco parentis authority reaches off-campus speech.
The capital and prisoner cases sharpen the point. When the Court summarily ruled for a prisoner kept in sewage-covered cells (Taylor v. Riojas), for a death-row petitioner’s pastor (Ramirez v. Collier), and for a woman whose sex life was paraded before her capital jury (Andrew v. White), Thomas dissented each time — in Taylor without so much as an opinion, in Ramirez on the ground that the petitioner was gaming the calendar, in Andrew, with Gorsuch, on the ground that no precedent clearly established the rule. Habeas, qualified immunity’s “clearly established” threshold, retaliatory-arrest claims: in each, the relief he would grant is narrower than the relief his colleagues would.
Landing beside the liberals
The breaks that landed him beside the liberals are not moderation; they are text and structure producing results the labels call liberal. His TransUnion dissent — joined by Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan — argued that violating a right Congress created is injury enough to sue, an originalist reading of standing that would open the courthouse door wider than the conservative majority would. In Arthrex he defended the patent judges Congress designed; in Borden and Concepcion his reading of criminal statutes favored the defendants; in Bittner he joined Barrett, Sotomayor and Kagan reading a tax penalty to run per account — the government’s side, which is what the database’s tax coding calls liberal; in Viking River he restated, alone, the position he has held since 1995 — that the Federal Arbitration Act does not govern state courts at all.
The through-line is the rule he set out in his Gamble concurrence: a “demonstrably erroneous” precedent should not be followed, whatever has been built on it. Scalia, his closest ally by the numbers (84.1% agreement across 1,154 divided cases), drew the contrast himself in an interview for Ken Foskett’s biography: “He doesn’t believe in stare decisis, period.”
In whole, not in part
Does he break partially — a concurrence here, a hedge there — or completely? Completely. Of the 28 bloc breaks, 25 were dissents; 1 was a concurrence in the judgment only (Borden), and 2 put him in a majority the bloc had abandoned (Becerra, Concepcion). Career-wide the same shape holds: 539 dissents against 238 regular concurrences — and when he is unpersuaded he does not need company.
Thomas has been the only justice in the minority in 52 cases — more than every other member of the current Court combined:
Career cases in which the justice was the lone member of the Court in the minority, through the 2024 term. Breyer, who retired in 2022, finished with 13.
The 28 breaks, case by case
Every case from the 2020 through 2024 terms in which at least four of the other five Republican appointees voted together and Thomas did not, oldest first.
Concurred in the judgment only, on his Voisine ground: the “use of physical force” requires intentional conduct, so a reckless offense cannot be an ACCA violent felony.
The Court summarily granted relief to a prisoner held in cells covered in sewage; Thomas dissented without opinion.
The Court set aside a Fifth Circuit ruling that a protest organizer could be sued for an officer’s injury; Thomas dissented without opinion.
Wrote the principal dissent: patent judges were constitutionally appointed inferior officers, and the majority’s remedy invented a new rule of review.
Wrote the principal dissent: violating a private right Congress created is itself injury enough for standing, without a further showing of “concrete” harm.
Solo dissent: schools acting in loco parentis could historically discipline off-campus speech aimed at the school, cheerleader or not.
Joined Gorsuch’s dissent (with Kagan): Alaska Native corporations are not federally recognized tribes, so they are not “Indian tribes” under the statute.
Solo dissent, on jurisdiction: Hemphill never properly raised his Confrontation Clause claim in the New York courts.
Joined Kagan’s majority (with Breyer, Sotomayor, Barrett) upholding HHS’s reading of the Medicare fraction.
Own dissent: the categorical approach has led the courts “through the looking glass” — an actual armed robbery escapes the label “crime of violence” because a hypothetical one might not involve force.
Solo dissent: the death-row petitioner’s shifting claims about his pastor’s role were litigation conduct aimed at delay, and equity should not reward it.
Joined Sotomayor’s majority (with Breyer, Kagan, Gorsuch): First Step Act resentencing courts keep their traditionally broad discretion.
Solo dissent, on his Southland ground held since 1995: the Federal Arbitration Act does not apply in state-court proceedings at all.
Joined Barrett’s dissent (with Sotomayor and Kagan): the Bank Secrecy Act’s text makes each unreported account a separate violation.
Own dissent: spending-clause conditions are contract terms with the states, not “laws” securing rights enforceable through §1983.
Own dissent: no enumerated power — not the Indian Commerce Clause, not an atextual “plenary power” — lets Congress direct state child-custody proceedings.
Solo dissent: the government cannot dismiss a whistleblower’s False Claims Act suit after declining to take it over — and private relators wielding executive power raise Article II problems.
Solo dissent: the Court should not have assumed Puerto Rico’s oversight board has sovereign immunity in the first place.
Joined most of Jackson’s dissent (with Sotomayor and Kagan): nothing in the statute makes an appeal on arbitration freeze the whole case.
Joined Barrett’s dissent and wrote separately: the majority’s reliance on New York Times v. Sullivan extends “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.”
Solo dissent, applying his own Bruen framework: “Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue.”
Wrote the dissent (joined by Alito): a veteran who switches GI Bill programs takes the statutory cap that comes with switching.
Wrote the dissent (joined by Gorsuch): the Sixteenth Amendment reaches only realized income, and the Moores never received theirs.
Solo dissent, restating his Nieves position: probable cause should defeat a retaliatory-arrest claim outright, with no exceptions.
Own dissent: the Gun Control Act’s definition of “firearm” does not stretch to unfinished frames and parts kits, whatever ATF’s rule says.
Wrote the dissent — joined by Alito, Kagan and Jackson — reading “during a national emergency” to require service actually connected to one.
With Gorsuch, would have granted the capital case full briefing and argument rather than summarily vacating; the database codes the notation as a dissent.
Wrote the dissent (joined by Gorsuch): no Supreme Court holding “clearly established” the general due-process rule the majority found in Payne.
Questions
Is Clarence Thomas the most conservative Supreme Court justice?
On the current Court, yes — his 32.2% liberal voting share is the lowest of the nine. Across the whole database since 1946, one justice's record is more conservative: William Rehnquist, at 30% liberal to Thomas's 32.2%. Thomas ranks 32nd of the 33 justices with enough coded votes to rank.
How often does Thomas vote with Alito?
In divided cases across the 2020 through 2024 terms, Thomas and Alito voted together 79.5% of the time (140 of 176 cases) — his highest agreement on the current Court. His highest career figure belongs to Antonin Scalia, at 84.1% across 1,154 divided cases.
Does Thomas ever vote with the liberal justices?
Yes. Of his 28 breaks from the conservative bloc in the 2020 through 2024 terms, 9 produced votes the Supreme Court Database codes liberal, and six put him alongside every sitting liberal at once — usually on structural or textual grounds, as in TransUnion (standing), Arthrex (appointments) and Concepcion (sentencing discretion).
How often does Thomas break from the conservative bloc?
In 125 divided cases from the 2020 through 2024 terms where at least four of the other five Republican appointees voted together, Thomas went the other way 28 times — 22.4%, more than one case in five. In 10 of the 28 he stood entirely alone.
Why does Thomas write so many solo dissents?
He has 52 career cases as the lone justice in the minority — more than the rest of the current Court combined (42). His stated rule, from his Gamble v. United States concurrence, is that a “demonstrably erroneous” precedent should simply not be followed, which produces positions no colleague will join and a willingness to restate them alone, term after term.
How this page is made
Every count on this page comes from the Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.), justice-centered, 2025 Release 01 — the same source, under the same rules, as every voting figure on this site (how those figures are made). The window is the 2020 through 2024 terms, the life so far of the current 6–3 alignment; Jackson replaced Breyer in 2022 without changing either bloc’s size. A “divided case” has at least one vote in the minority; a “break” is defined in the section above, and the four-of-five threshold exists so that one absent colleague cannot erase a break that plainly happened.
“Liberal” and “conservative” are the database’s terms of art, not ours, and its codings are judgment calls — including here: it records the Hamm v. Smith notation (Thomas and Gorsuch would have heard the case rather than summarily vacate) as a dissent, and it declines to code a direction in two of the 28 break cases. The grouping of the six Republican appointees as a “bloc” is this site’s only editorial judgment on the page, and the agreement figures above are the evidence for it. Case notes were checked against the slip opinions and syllabuses at supremecourt.gov. Quotations: Thomas’s rule on precedent from his concurrence in Gamble v. United States, 587 U.S. 678 (2019); “masquerading” from his opinion respecting denial of certiorari in McKee v. Cosby, 139 S. Ct. 675 (2019); Scalia’s remark from Ken Foskett, Judging Thomas (2004).