An Introduction to the NYU Journal of Law & Liberty Symposium, “The Unknown Justice”
Most well-known public figures, in my experience, are considerably more complex than their conventional media portraits. I can only speculate why that might be. Perhaps risk-averse public figures exercise so much control these days over the sides of themselves to which they offer access that the media simply see less of this complexity. I have detected also a kind of risk aversion on the side of journalists. A standard set of images and perspectives on public figures seems to set in, and what economists call “herd behavior” follows: many journalists seem cautious about stepping too far outside this shared professional consensus, particularly if the figure is politically controversial.
Justice Thomas is one of those figures I have in mind when I mention this greater complexity. Those of us who follow the Supreme Court closely have been aware for some time that Justice Thomas has been carving out a distinct set of ideas and approaches in many areas of the law, but among major journalists who cover the Court, the first who was prepared to offer the beginning of a portrait of Justice Thomas as an independent thinker on the Court was Jan Crawford Greenburg, in her recent book, Supreme Conflict.
