Jan Crawford, CBS News chief legal correspondent, said Justice Clarence Thomas is “the most misunderstood and misreported figure in modern political and legal history.”
Crawford served as the keynote speaker at the Farrah Law Alumni Society Banquet in Birmingham, where the society honored Justice Janie L. Shores with the Sam W. Pipes Award for distinguishing herself through service to the bar, The University of Alabama, and the School of Law.
After Justice Thomas arrived at the U.S. Supreme Court, a narrative quickly developed, painting him as an understudy of Justice Antonin Scalia.
“That narrative is demonstrably, emphatically, unequivocally false,” Crawford said. “Justice Thomas, from his first conference, his first week on the bench, was staking out opinions completely and independently of Scalia, on his own, showing that he was willing to be the sole dissenter.”
Using notes at the Library of Congress penned by Justice Harry Blackmun and other court memos, Crawford traced Justice Thomas’s actions early in his career. She pointed to a Louisiana case where each of the nine justices had planned to cast a vote for an inmate and against the state of Louisiana. The next day Justice Thomas changed his vote, becoming the sole dissenter. After circulating his dissent, three other justices said that Thomas’s argument had persuaded them to change their vote. Ultimately, the decision was 5-4.
“Justice Thomas, by the force of his views, in his first week on the court, persuaded three of his colleagues that their original position was wrong,’’ said Crawford, the author of Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court. “But again, that was not the story line that was reported, and this, to me, is a cautionary tale for people in my business and also for people who read what’s being reported.”
Justice Thomas, she said, is perhaps one of the most forceful conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court, and it is a disservice to him and the court to portray him as an understudy.
“I believe we should be talking about – not whether he’s following Scalia, which he is not – but talking about what Justice Thomas is saying. You can disagree with him; you can agree with him. But you cannot make the assertion that he is the lackey of Antonin Scalia.”
Justice Thomas, like all justices, has had an effect on the U.S. Supreme Court, but the most dramatic shift may come after the 2016 election.
“When the next president takes office, four of the justices by the end of the term – a fifth soon – will be in their 80s, so I think that there is no question that the 2016 election will have an enormous impact on the shape and the future of the Supreme Court.”