Clarence Thomas’ Jurisprudence Is Only Getting More Chaotic – By Mark Joseph Stern (Slate) / April 22, 2022
The justice’s attack on a landmark school desegregation case is the latest illustration of his erratic extremism.
On Thursday, Justice Clarence Thomas made a surprising proclamation: A celebrated ruling against school segregation—which, along with Brown v. Board of Education, abolished the doctrine of “separate but equal”—was wrongly decided. That decision, 1954’s Bolling v. Sharpe, compelled the federal government to abide by equal protection principles. It forms the basis of countless landmark civil rights decisions over the last 70 years.
And now, Thomas declared, it should be overturned.
The justice’s condemnation of Bolling came in the form of a concurrence to U.S. v. Vaello Madero, an 8–1 decision upholding the denial of Supplemental Security Income benefits to residents of Puerto Rico. But Thomas’ opinion is not really about that unfortunate ruling. Rather, his opinion marks the latest chapter in a career-long quest to replace long-established precedent with a confused, slapdash substitute based on amateur historical analysis and tendentious conservative law review articles. In 15 muddled pages, the justice promoted a series of sea changes in the law, suggesting that the court should legalize sweeping discrimination against noncitizens and erase modern equal protection jurisprudence.
