Clarence Thomas found his voice, a voice one rarely if ever hears from the U.S. Supreme Court bench, in New Haven this weekend.
Appearing at a reunion weekend forum with two other fellow alums who sit on the Supreme Court — Sonia Sotomayor and Samuel A. Alito, Jr. —the famously reticent Thomas, who can go years without speaking from the bench, told stories, gave insight into life at the court and explained his former sour feelings toward the Yale Law School.
He told current law students “not to do what I did,” adding back in the day, “there was so much here that I walked right by, that I closed my eyes and my heart to.”
Justice Sotomayor admitted that when she gets immersed in her work she shuts everything else out. “I become oblivious to those around me,” she said, adding to a perception that she is combative. “I am trying to correct some of that.”
And Justice Alito emerged as quick, funny and personable, traits not often visible during public proceedings. When Justice Sotomayor revealed she can’t keep a beat but learned to dance the salsa by following her partner, “a facility that some of my colleagues would find very strange,” Justice Alito did not miss a beat.
“It’s a revelation to know that Sonia likes to follow. I think we are going to start dancing in the conference room,” he said smiling as the audience laughed and applauded.
The three justices returned to the law school Saturday for a special event honoring their achievements in the legal world and their service on the U.S. Supreme Court. Dean Robert Post presented the law school’s highest award, The Award of Merit, to Justice Thomas ‘74, Justice Alito ’75, and Justice Sotomayor ’79 as hundreds of faculty and alums applauded the moment. This was Justice Thomas’s 40th reunion and Justice Sotomayor’s 35th.
Marcia Chambers Photo
Dean Post gave an overview of each of their lives before presenting the Award of Merit. “The tale of each of these justices is a quintessentially American story, a story of upward mobility; of hard, relentless work; of staggering achievement; and of great inborn talent,” said Post. “In different ways, and in the name of different ideals, each of our honorees has already left an indelible mark on the shape of our common jurisprudence.”
Then the justices engaged in a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation with Professor Kate Stith, a sentencing and criminal law expert, as if they were seated in her living room. She addressed them informally, as they had asked, calling them Clarence, Sam and Sonia.
The 90-minute conversation did not center on the justices’ views of specific cases, though this audience group well knew that Clarence and Sam, part of the high court’s conservative wing, usually vote together and differently from Sonia. Instead Stith sought to provide insight into their personalities and how they became who they are.
One of the most poignant moments came at the end of their conversation, when Stith asked each justice about their Saturday morning visit with current Yale law students. Each spoke individually to 30 law students. Justice Thomas told his group “not to do what I did,” he said, referring to his law school days, when he has described himself as alienated and bitter.
“There’s a lot we didn’t know,” he said. Earlier in the three-way conversation he said he hadn’t found out about clerkships until two years after he left the law school. Sotomayor said if it hadn’t been for Jose Cabranes, now a circuit court judge, she would not have known about getting a clerkship with a judge.
“I walked right by,” Thomas told the current students, recounting their discussion. “There was a lot of negativity on my part.” He said he is now 66 and has a different perspective.
He credited John Danforth, then Missouri’s Attorney General and a Yale Law School graduate, with helping to turn him around. “Work for a good person,” he said. Danforth later became a U.S. senator and ambassador to the United Nations. When Thomas left Yale in 1974 he did not have a job. Danforth hired him.
Thomas said Saturday’s event was “far more special” than his graduation, adding he had become “more idealistic now than I was back then.” He has, he said, learned to let things go. His final words were a reminder of his early life:. “I grew up under segregation.”
At one point Justices Thomas and Sotomayor discussed what appears to be a different kind of segregated Supreme Court, one that is segregated by geography and by legal training. Thomas noted that the nation’s highest court has “such a strong Northeastern orientation” and that the justices were educated at either Yale or Harvard law schools. Sotomayor said the court would benefit from lawyers who come from small or mid-sized firms.
Spittoons, Not Email
YLS
Alito, Sotomayor and Thomas at Yale Law School Saturday.
Then Professor Stith said, “I am going to ask each of you to tell us something about the other two. So Sonia, tell us something about Clarence.”
Sotomayor, who sat between Alito and Thomas, said: “Clarence knows the name of every employee in the courthouse, from the lowest position to the highest.” Before she could finish the sentence the room exploded in applause. Then she added, “And with virtually all of them, he knows their families, their happiness and their tragedies.”
Alito described Sotomayor as “very independent. She is very thorough in her preparation, not only on the merits of cases, but on the hundreds of cert petitions that we discuss. She is very strong in her views, and she doesn’t give up on the rest of us even when she sees the majority is going off in the wrong direction. She has hope that she can convince us, and she makes good arguments and sometimes she succeeds.”
“Goodness, she never gives up,” Thomas interjected with a laugh.
“What surprised you most about the court?” Professor Stith asked each of the justices.
All three agreed that the atmosphere and operation of the U.S. Supreme Court is extremely formal. The court has not reached the point where it even uses email. A discussion of texting did not develop when it became clear e‑mail had not yet arrived.
Alito told the audience: “We are very, very formal in the way we operate.” He noted that extending an oral argument in a lower appeals court if time permits would not occur in the Supreme Court.
“We are very old fashioned. We don’t communicate with each at all by email. It is all done by hard copy. We still have the spittoons by our seats,” he said to a round of laughter from the audience.
The standard procedure is for one of them to write a letter and circulate it to everyone. “We do see one another, we have lunch together. We meet,” Alito said. But Sotomayor observed that when they lunch together, tradition demands they sit in the seat of “our previous justice’s chair.” At times, she said, “the tradition can be overwhelming.”
Thomas said when he first arrived on the court, “I can’t say I was surprised. I had no idea what I got myself into. It was very formal.”
It turns out that Thomas is in the forefront of computer life at the court. “I use email, but when I first got to the court there was no internal email. I work paperless, and our chamber is almost exclusively paperless. Maybe at some point we will do it with the court.”
What surprised him the most when he arrived at the court in 1991 was “how warm everybody was. I was pleasantly surprised by that. He described conversations with Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O’Connor, who were “fully engaged, talking about cases.” What was conveyed to him back then was that “the work was more important than they were and I was and that our job was to turn out the best product we could.
“When I came on the court I was 40 years younger than Justice Blackmun. I was thinking, ‘If he is doing this at his age, it can’t be all that hard.’ First term, I had fallen along the way ‚and he was still going.”
Sotomayor said overall she learned that “the court as an institution was more important than I was as an individual justice. It is an important lesson for justices to learn and to live by.”
As for coming into the modern technological age, Sotomayor said: “I think there are two reasons why justices don’t use technology so much. One is tradition, but the other is some of them don’t know how.” The audience laughed again. She added that “the most computer savvy justice is Clarence.”
Thomas jumped in, observing that “Justice Stevens was my ally” in an effort to bring the court into the modern world. “I could count on him.” Justice Stevens, now 94, retired from the bench in 2010.
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