Clarence Thomas’s Jurisprudence Unexplained
Clarence Thomas is the most interesting justice to sit on the Supreme Court in a generation. His opinions are rigorous, consistent, and unintimidated by the intellectual fads that have swept through the legal elite for the past half century. Despite what some have said, Thomas is not a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination.
As his recent memoir made absolutely clear, Thomas is a religious conservative whose views on law and politics are deeply influenced by his Catholic faith and by historical tradition. Yet his decisions bear a certain affinity with libertarian views, in which he is quite conversant. His jurisprudence is probably best described in Scott Douglas Gerber’s term, as “liberal originalism”: a version of originalism closer to the Jeffersonian principles of individual liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence than the “conservative originalism” associated with Robert Bork and others who deprecate Jeffersonian principles and cling to the “civic republicanism” interpretation of the American Revolution.
