Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, who this weekend will mark 30 years on the Court, has little patience for precedent veneration. No idol of lawyerly adoration is safe in his chambers. He once called upon his colleagues to reconsider the holding of Calder v. Bull, a case that the Supreme Court decided in 1798. As he often takes care to explain in his lucid opinions, the Court’s job is to be faithful to the Constitution and to the law, not to its own decisions.
Lawyers who are invested in particular precedents, or in judicial supremacy generally, sometimes clutch their pearls when Thomas questions the Court’s prior decisions. Never are pearls more in danger of being snatched from stiffened necks than when Thomas mentions one precedent in particular, Roe v. Wade. His willingness to criticize the Court’s abortion precedents is often the subtext when discussion turns to the senior justice’s jurisprudence. The Court is poised to discuss those precedents this term as it deliberates in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Justice Thomas has done more than any other justice to make it plausible that the Court could conduct a critical examination of Roe in the Dobbs case.
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