Why I Admire Justice Thomas
I begin with a disclaimer. I am not a scholar—of Supreme Court jurisprudence in general, or Justice Thomas’s jurisprudence, or anything else. And I have never met Justice Thomas, unless appearing before the Supreme Court as an advocate counts as “meeting” the Justices. I am just a former lawyer, now judge, who has read quite a few Supreme Court opinions and, in the course of doing so, has become a Justice Thomas fan. My purpose here is to tell you why.
I admire him most of all for the breadth of his vision. Again and again, I find in reading his opinions that he puts in perspective what a case is really, in a broad sense, about; what purpose the constitutional doctrine under discussion should serve or should not disserve; what good or evil can be expected from a particular rule of law. I think I could multiply examples almost indefinitely, but I will give you three.
A favorite of mine is Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion in Graham v. Collins. That was a death penalty case, and in his concurrence, Justice Thomas addressed a disturbing fact often mentioned by death penalty opponents: according to much evidence, a black defendant is more likely, other things being equal, to be sentenced to death than a white one. Usually, of course, this fact is presented as a reason for abolishing the death penalty3 or for subjecting death sentences to a kind of racial proportionality review.
