Tag: Clarence Thomas

Assessing the Supreme Court’s new oral argument format

When the coronavirus pandemic forced it to move to telephonic oral arguments last May, the U.S. Supreme Court adopted a new format. Each Justice, in descending order of seniority, was afforded three minutes to ask questions of each side. The result was much cleaner, and in many ways more interesting, that the conversational scrum that typically erupts at One First Street. Justice Thomas has come alive, knowing that he will be able to get a question out without interruption. And while more junior Justices have some of the wind taken out of their sails for having to wait their turn, some of the follow-up questions have proven to be equally interesting and clarifying.

Of course, not everyone is happy with the new format, and Bloomberg Law reporter Kimberly Strawbridge Robinson has been all over it. Last month, she explained that it has been harder for advocates and reporters to get a sense of what’s on the mind of Amy Coney Barrett, the juniormost Justice, since she is last in the queue to ask questions. And recently, she reported that many of the Justices themselves dislike the format, specifically because it stifles the freewheeling discussion to which they are accustomed. In particular, Justice Breyer, who likes to tease out lengthy hypotheticals during oral argument, has been frustrated to hear the Chief Justice say “your time is up” before the question is even complete.

I’m not sure there is an answer that will please everyone. My gut instinct is to extend the time for oral argument — there is nothing magical about 30 minutes per side — but that will probably just invite more palaverous and repetitive questions. What about submitting written questions to the parties after the argument? I’m just spitballing here. But having enjoyed getting to hear Justice Thomas’s thinking during telephonic hearings — not to mention the clarity of not having everyone talk over each other — I would hate to just have a knee-jerk reversion to the old system when the pandemic subsides.

Barrett confirmed and sworn in

Amy Coney Barrett is now the newest Justice of the United States Supreme Court. After a 52-48 vote Senate vote, she was sworn in last night by Justice Clarence Thomas.

Justice Barrett has demonstrated the intelligence, legal skill, care, and demeanor to be an influential member of the Court for decades to come. As importantly, the Court is back to full strength and in a better position to carry out its Constitutional duties efficiently and effectively.

The Affirmation Alternative: A Religious Case for Atheist Oaths

A guest post by M. Ryan Groff

On March 30, 2019, Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, spoke at Pepperdine University School of Law’s 2019 annual dinner. He reflected broadly on the relationship between faith and judicial duty, drawing from his own experiences and also from past conversations with his former colleague, the late Antonin Scalia. During a brief aside, Justice Thomas questioned the meaning of oaths made by atheists:

“As an aside, I think it’s really interesting that people in a profession where we all take an oath, that they would look at people who have strong faith as somehow not good people when, if you’re an atheist, what does an oath mean? If you are a Christian, and you believe in God, what does an oath mean? You know, what do you say at the end of it? ‘So help me God.’ And you have taken an oath to God, and, as Mother Theresa said, it’s between you and God. So, you have given your word… when you give your word to God, is that special? And I think if you are faithful, you think it is special, and you work doubly hard to make sure you live up to it… Not only doesn’t it [faith] interfere in any way, it actually enhances your view of the oath.”

It is not difficult to understand what Justice Thomas means. If someone swears on something he does not believe exists, then there is good cause to question the trustworthiness of whatever was promised. However, the concern with these comments, ironically, has to do with oathtaking in colonial America and one of Congress’s earliest interpretations of the Constitution. Continue reading “The Affirmation Alternative: A Religious Case for Atheist Oaths”

The risk of upending settled doctrinal expectations

A guest post by Lawrence Friedman

Courts strive to avoid sudden, tectonic shifts in doctrine. The legitimacy of their decisionmaking depends upon two of the values that mark the rule of law: consistency and predictability. Absent adequate justification for a doctrinal shift and judicial decisionmaking starts to look like it is based more on caprice than reason.

The U.S. Supreme Court is not immune from the risks associated with such shifts—indeed, in two separate opinions in the past few weeks, Justice Clarence Thomas has argued that the Supreme Court consider radical changes in approach to long settled constitutional doctrines.

Concurring in the denial of certiorari in McKee v. Cosby, Thomas explained that, in an appropriate case, the court should reconsider the precedents underlying the First Amendment rule that public figures cannot pursue damages for defamation absent a showing of “‘actual malice’—that is, with knowledge that [the statement] was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and its progeny, Thomas argued, “were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law” that the Court “should not continue to reflexively apply.”

More recently, in Garza v. Idaho, Thomas (joined this time by Justice Neil Gorsuch) dissented from the majority’s ruling that, notwithstanding that a criminal defendant has waived the right to certain bases for appeal, prejudice should be presumed when his attorney does not pursue an appeal after being requested to do so. Thomas disagreed not only with the ruling but the basic premise of Sixth Amendment doctrine—that criminal defendants have a right to effective counsel. No modern precedent, he argued, including Gideon v. Wainwright, sought to square this rule “with the original meaning of the ‘right … to have the Assistance of Counsel.’” He suggested that the Sixth Amendment guarantees the accused only “the services of an attorney,” and assumptions to the contrary conflict “with the government’s legitimate interest in the finality of criminal judgments.”

Justice Thomas’s originalist approaches to defamation under the First Amendment and the right to counsel under the Sixth may be criticized on substantive grounds. As to the former, consider Eugene Volokh’s conclusion that “constitutional constraints on speech-based civil liability have deep roots, stretching back to the Framing era” and Sullivan is “entirely consistent with original meaning.” As to the latter, consider the textualist argument that the very existence of a right to counsel privileges the individual’s interest over a governmental interest in finality, and that ineffective counsel undermines the integrity of this premise.

Even setting aside these substantive concerns, Thomas’s opinions preview what Chief Justice Roberts may look forward to should more justices be appointed who share not just Thomas’s interpretive approach, but his willingness to cast aside settled rules in favor of a return to the presumed original understanding of the constitution. It is not just a dispute, in other words, about meaning, but about the way in which the Supreme Court goes about the business of constitutional rulemaking.

A radical alteration in settled doctrine runs the risk that the Court’s decisionmaking is unmoored from the past, and that the justices cannot be counted on to create reasonable expectations for the future. It is not just about a loss of respect, but the dilution of a hard-earned legitimacy. One of the reasons the American people abide by the decisions of unelected judges about the meaning of our most sacred secular text is because, agree or disagree, there is in most areas of constitutional law a continuity that has allowed public and private institutions and individuals alike to rely upon expectations the Court itself has set about the boundaries of its reach—expectations that allow us to make our own plans and plot own courses.

To return to one of Roberts’s favorite analogies: no umpire who decided, one day, to honor the strike zone as it existed in baseball’s infancy would last long on the job. The players, the pitching, the equipment, the field—all are different today. Umpiring has accounted for these differences, as managers and players well know. They have expectations about the range of possible calls an umpire might make when the ball hurtles toward the catcher’s glove, and they trust that those expectations will hold true from game to game, and across the seasons. Chief Justice Roberts has intuited that Americans rightly expect the same of their Supreme Court—and that they likely would find ways to marginalize the Court if it were otherwise.

Justice Thomas on the “myth” of judging

Justice Clarence Thomas recently spoke at a Supreme Court Fellows program at the Library of Congress. According to reports, he addressed a wide range of court-related issues, ranging from the federal confirmation process to his own tenure on the court.

But this is the passage that really struck me:

“There’s a real decided difference between what is said about what goes on and judging and the court and what actually happens,” Thomas said. “There’s the real world and there’s the myth of that world.”

Thomas specifically cited accusations that judges “just want to execute people.”

“I haven’t met a judge who wants to execute anybody,” he said. “I haven’t met that judge yet. In fact, every judge I have met, going through these cases — look at what it does to your hair. You start out, your hair is black. You have lots of it. Then all of a sudden, you’re follically impaired. Your hair, what’s left, it turns gray, and you say, ‘Oh my God, another execution.’ Every one of us is like, ‘Did I get it right? Did I make a mistake?’”

In our tantrum-induced political environment, it’s easy to ascribe the worst motivations to anyone with whom we disagree, and even easier to caricature them as monsters. Judges struggle with the difficult issues more than most of us — and unlike legislators, have little or no opportunity to respond to brazen personal attacks.