My new book review is up on Slate, critiquing federal Judge Amul Thapar’s paean to Justice Clarence Thomas.
Here is the gist:
Titled The People’s Justice: Clarence Thomas and the Constitutional Stories that Define Him, Thapar’s book is nominally a defense of Thomas’ jurisprudence, but the unmistakable subtext is his own claim to be Thomas’ logical successor.
According to Thapar, “cherry-picking” critics have unfairly characterized Thomas as “the cruelest justice,” who favors “the rich over the poor” and the “strong over the weak.” In rebuttal, Thapar just cherry-picks his own 12 cases, showing that “Thomas’s originalism more often favors the ordinary people who come before the Court.”
The manuscript for The People’s Justice was no doubt completed well before the recent revelations about Thomas’ decades of lavish junketing as the guest of billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow. This inconvenient timing accounts for Thapar’s repetition of the story that Thomas vacations incognito in a motor home and would “rather spend his time in Walmart parking lots than at cocktail parties.”
In his conclusion, Thapar tells us that Thomas knows, “like all originalists, that you cannot fully respect a people unless you respect their choices, too.” This is an odd claim, given Thomas’ frequent votes to invalidate democratically enacted statutes—the Voting Rights Act, New York’s gun control law, California’s agricultural labor law, and many others—in favor of his own divination of the Constitution’s original meaning. Thomas, says Thapar, tries his best “to figure out what the American people understood the Constitution to mean when they ratified it,” without mentioning that the long-deceased ratifiers were all white, male, and property owners, and that more than half of all Americans had no say at all. Originalism may have its virtues, but respect for living people’s choices is not among them.
You can read the entire review on Slate.
Posted by Steve Lubet on July 26, 2023 at 07:43 AM