Picture Clarence Thomas as a legal Indiana Jones, dodging slings and arrows to rescue a valuable and powerful relic from the wrong hands after it fell into undeserved obscurity. That’s the thesis of Myron Magnet’s new book. Magnet, a longtime editor of City Journal, isn’t himself a lawyer, though he is at ease explaining legal arguments for non-lawyers. So this isn’t weighty legal scholarship or a thorough biography. It is, rather, a potboiler, briskly surveying how our founding charter went missing, what impelled Justice Thomas to go looking for it, and what he unearthed. At the end of the journey, …
This article appears as “Raider of The Lost Constitution” in the June 24, 2019, print edition of National Review.