Clarence X?: The Black Nationalist Behind Justice Thomas’s Constitutionalism
Justice Clarence Thomas has been on the nation’s highest court for almost twenty years. When he arrived at the Supreme Court, some dismissed him as an intellectual lightweight—someone who simply parroted the views of his jurisprudential master, Justice Antonin Scalia. Court-watchers—intelligent and fair-minded ones, anyway—finally recognize this attack as the unfair caricature that it is. Even scholars who disagree with Justice Thomas now admit that, on important issues ranging from the proper scope of congressional power under the Commerce Clause to the constitutionality of affirmative action, Justice Thomas has written thought-provoking, carefully reasoned opinions.
The opinions of Justice Thomas reflect a jurisprudence that is uniquely his own. His well-known commitment to textualism and originalism combines with a weak commitment to stare decisis on constitutional questions. This often puts Thomas at odds with Justice Scalia and other Justices who are far more willing to defer to precedents with which they disagree. The most distinctive aspect of Thomas’s jurisprudence, however, involves cases of particular concern to black Americans. In these cases, his originalism and textualism are powerfully supplemented by another -ism—namely, “black nationalism.”
