Ariane de Vogue on Justice Thomas
Michael Ramsey

"More so than any of the justices he's served with during his 25 years on the Court, there's a coherent theory behind almost every one of the opinions he writes," said Steve Vladeck, a CNN contributor and law professor at the University of Texas School of Law.

 

From his earliest days on the bench Thomas has stuck with a rare discipline to his view that the Constitution should be interpreted based on its original public meaning.

"He has exceeded all of our expectations about the magnitude of his talent," C. Boyden Gray, who worked in the White House Counsel's office on the Thomas nomination, said recently.

 

Although he largely stays out of public view, Thomas still attracts plenty of controversy and much of it concerns his opinions on race. The coming term will be no exception. He confounds his critics who seek something different from the man who replaced Justice Thurgood Marshall, a famed civil rights lawyer, on the court but delights his supporters for looking at the Constitution through what they believe is a color-blind lens.

 

His supporters were stunned when the Smithsonian opened a major museum meant to promote and highlight the contributions of African-Americans last month and almost entirely ignored the achievements of a black man who rose up from poverty to reach the highest pinnacle of the federal judiciary. His name came up only in reference to Hill's Senate testimony. They question why there is so little attention to Thomas' overall jurisprudence and so much time spent analyzing why he chooses to remain largely silent during oral arguments.

 

Also:

 

"It's long been a mistake to view Justice Thomas as operating in Justice Scalia's shadow," said Vladeck. "Behind the fact that they often (albeit not always) ended up on the same side of disputes lurked some fairly significant differences in methodology, interpretative commitments and style."

 

Agreed.

 

(Thanks to one of my Constitutional Law students for the pointer).