In the Washington Free Beacon, Adam J. White (George Mason – Scalia): The Justice’s People (reviewing The People’s Justice: Clarence Thomas and the Constitutional Stories that Define Him by Judge Amul Thapar). From the introduction:
… Justice Thomas [has been] dogged relentlessly by accusations that his judgments and jurisprudence punished the poor and weak. A year into his service on the Court, the New York Times called him "The Youngest, Cruelest Justice" and condemned him for purportedly turning his back on society’s most vulnerable. And this year, when the Supreme Court ruled that race-based university admissions are unlawful, one prominent pundit tweeted a photograph of Thomas, denouncing "the face of a man who climbed the ladder of affirmative action to his present perch of power only to help destroy the very ladder on which he ascended."
After decades of such attacks, Judge Amul Thapar responds in Thomas’s defense. "By cherry-picking his opinions or misrepresenting them," Thapar writes, "Justice Thomas’s critics claim that his originalism favors the rich over the poor, the strong over the weak, and corporations over consumers." Thapar shows that many of Thomas’s opinions actually cut in the other direction. He recounts 12 of those cases, and the people at the heart of them, in The People’s Justice: Clarence Thomas and the Constitutional Stories That Define Him.
Some of these cases are already famous, their people the subjects of entire books. The best example is Susette Kelo, who struggled to defend her modest home against the combined powers of local politicians and Pfizer, who sought to force the sale of her house for the sake of a new corporate campus that would supposedly boost the local economy and tax revenues. When the Supreme Court upheld their taking of private property as constitutional, Justice Thomas dissented emphatically: "Something has gone seriously awry with this Court’s interpretation of the Constitution. Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not," due to the Court’s "almost complete deference it grants to legislatures as to what satisfies it."
Less famous are other cases, such as City of Chicago v. Morales (1999), where the Court ruled that Chicago’s anti-gang loitering law was unconstitutionally vague. Here, too, Justice Thomas dissented, highlighting the people who would suffer from the Court’s ruling—and his colleagues’ comfortable distance from the brutal reality of the situation. "Today the Court focuses extensively on the ‘rights’ of gang members and their companions," he wrote. "It can safely do so—the people who will have to live with the consequences of today’s opinion do not live in our neighborhood. Rather, the people who will suffer from our lofty pronouncements are people like Ms. Susan Mary Jackson; people who have seen their neighborhoods literally destroyed by gangs and violence and drugs."
The book’s title and cover photo notwithstanding, each chapter centers not on Justice Thomas’s opinions, but on the personal stories underlying each case. In each chapter, Thomas’s opinion—10 dissents and 2 concurrences, never a majority opinion for the Court—punctuates a story of common people and communities. The book might have been called The Justice’s People. …
Posted at 6:06 AM