Despite his iconic silence in oral arguments, Clarence Thomas is not the least-known justice to sit on the Supreme Court in recent years. That distinction probably belongs to the famously reclusive David Souter, who shared the bench with Thomas from 1991 to 2009. But if Thomas’ public profile is slightly greater, his judicial philosophy is less understood. In Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution , writer and historian Myron Magnet seeks to remedy that.
Perhaps most perceptibly, Magnet confirms what closer observers of the court have long known: Thomas is a different kind of conservative than the other Republican-appointed justices.
Antonin Scalia justly earned the credit for taking originalism — the idea that the words of the Constitution ought to be interpreted according to the original public understanding of those words at the time of its composition — from obscure theory to standard method. But in Thomas, the theory has found near-perfection.
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