Clarence Thomas: Supreme Court Justice

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point Georgia. He is now a conservative and controversial judge although initially he had wanted to pursue a religious life as a priest. He was one of the first African American students to attend St. John Vianny’s. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. was a turning point in Thomas’ life as he left the seminary and attended Holy Cross University, after overhearing another student make racist remarks about MLK. After graduating with a BA in English, Thomas was admitted to the Missouri Bar on September 1974 and shortly after began work in the office of the Missouri Attorney General. He worked under the supervision of Senator John Danforth until President Reagan offered him a position in

While Justice Thomas is famous for his silence during oral argument, this does not mean that his lack of input in cases makes the other justices wary of where he may stand in issues because of his known conservative reputation. What drives his conservative stance on the Supreme Court is his “originalist” philosophy which calls for interpreting the Constitution as the Founding Fathers primary intents were. As Ralph Rossum states “During his years on the Court, Thomas has pursued an original general meaning approach to constitutional interpretation; he has been unswayed by claims of precedent, by the gradual buildup of interpretations that, to his mind, come to distort the original meaning of the constitutional provision in question, leading to muddled decisions and contradictory conclusions” meaning that Thomas determines cases based on strict interpretation of the Constitution and does not think that neither precedent or stare decisis have any weight on recent cases. The only document that has a true significant precedent is the Constitution itself. His judicial philosophy surely makes him an enigma to