Clarence Thomas Is in the Wrong Line of Work
Updated at 2:53 p.m. ET on March 7, 2019.
February is a slow, miserable slog, but late last month Justice Clarence Thomas was having the time of his life. As Adam Liptak lays out in Tuesday’s New York Times, in a two-week period, Thomas managed to attack the basis of American press freedom and negate the right to appointed counsel for criminal defendants. He also casually suggested that the Supreme Court redo not only Roe v. Wade but virtually all its individual-rights decisions since at least 1938. Even this most radical of justices has scored a personal best.
No one can say he wasn’t aiming high. ,the press-freedom case he dismissed as wrongly decided, has been reaffirmed and extended countless times since its ruling was issued in 1964, by justices on both sides of the ideological divide. The same is true,the 1963 case holding that the Sixth Amendment’s right to “assistance of counsel” requires states to provide appointed lawyers for indigent defendants charged with most crimes. These are not strange outlier decisions, or relics of an unenlightened past, but—in my opinion at least—“super precedents,” a term coined by former Fourth Circuit Judge J. Michael Luttig. There’s no universal list of super precedents, but everyone agrees that such cases exist. The University of North Carolina law professor Michael Gerhardt, an authority on Supreme Court uses of precedent, defines the status this way:
