But then he went another three years before asking another one. Talk about embarrassing and disgraceful. Thomas, a Yale Law graduate, piped up unexpectedly during a discussion of whether a lawyer had provided a defendant with adequate counsel.
Now does anyone believe that was funny enough to justify breaking a hard-fought, much-criticized, 2,day record of silence? In , two law professors published a paper that looked at Thomas differently.
Those sound like good things. The professors encouraged Thomas to speak up more. He previously served 11 years as editor of the editorial page and was also a former editor of the Op-Ed page and the Sunday Opinion section.
He is a graduate of Harvard University. The digital travel company sued and won when a lower court held that the name "Booking" combined with ". Ross, the couple of questions," Thomas began. He later followed up with questions to Booking. Thomas has given many explanations for his singular silence through the years, including that he believes the justices should give the lawyers at the lectern more time to present their cases.
He earlier referred to his youth in Pin Point, Georgia, where he developed a dialect he said was mocked; Thomas has said that gave him the habit of listening more than speaking. In March , he made headlines when he asked a question involving race during a case concerning a Mississippi prosecutor's repeated elimination of blacks from a jury pool. And nearly three years before that, the justice broke a year silence when he spoke during oral arguments in a case about whether a prior domestic assault conviction based on reckless conduct qualifies as a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence that would block the plaintiffs from possessing a firearm.
For better or worse, Thomas has made important contributions to the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court. Scalia wrote District of Columbia v. Heller, which restricted gun control, and Kennedy wrote Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission , which undermined decades of campaign-finance law, but Thomas was an intellectual godfather of both decisions.
Still, there is more to the job of Supreme Court Justice than writing opinions. It is an indispensable part of the legal system.
But the process works only if the Justices engage. The current Supreme Court is almost too ready to do so, and sometimes lawyers have a hard time getting a word in edgewise. In question-and-answer sessions at law schools, Thomas has said that his colleagues talk too much, that he wants to let the lawyers say their piece, and that the briefs tell him all he needs to know.
Thomas is simply not doing his job. By refusing to acknowledge the advocates or his fellow-Justices, Thomas treats them all with disrespect. But at this point, eight years on, Thomas is demeaning the Court. Imagine, for a moment, if all nine Justices behaved as Thomas does on the bench. The public would rightly, and immediately, lose all faith in the Supreme Court. Since those days, Supreme Court advocates had to adjust to a hot bench in which justices would often interrupt counsel mid-sentence.
In recent years prior to the pandemic, the norm became eight of the justices asking at least one question during a typical oral argument. Thomas was the exception. His reticence on the bench, which was not as noteworthy early in his tenure, became for court watchers a distinctive trait.
At one point, the justice went over a decade without asking any substantive questions from the bench, and it made headlines when he broke his silence. Thomas explained his general approach toward oral argument in They should argue.
These are not children. The court traditionally did not do that. I have been there 20 years. I see no need for all of that. Most of that is in the briefs, and there are a few questions around the edges. Thomas has not been alone in thinking the pace of questions from justices has gotten out of hand.
But two weeks did not pass before Justice Sonia Sotomayor broke the rule, and others would subsequently do the same. Of course, Thomas is anything but a silent justice in the most substantive aspect of his work. He is a notably prolific jurist who, even if he were not to serve another day, has already earned himself a place in the pantheon of Supreme Court justices for his originalist jurisprudence. Over the past five years, he has consistently written more opinions than any of his colleagues.
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