Clarence Thomas (born June 23, 1948) is an American lawyer and jurist who has served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States since 1991. Nominated by President George H. W. Bush to succeed Thurgood Marshall, Thomas is the second African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court and the second longest-serving U.S. Supreme Court justice in history.
Thomas was born in Pin Point, Georgia. After his father abandoned the family, he was raised by his grandfather in a poor Gullah community near Savannah, Georgia. Growing up as a devout Catholic, Thomas originally intended to be a priest in the Catholic Church but became dissatisfied with its efforts to combat racism and abandoned his aspiration to join the clergy. He graduated with honors from the College of the Holy Cross in 1971 and earned his Juris Doctor in 1974 from Yale Law School. Upon graduating, he was appointed as an assistant attorney general in Missouri and later entered private practice there. He became a legislative assistant to U.S. senator John Danforth in 1979, and was made Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education in 1981. President Ronald Reagan appointed Thomas as Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) the next year.
President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1990. He served in that role for 19 months before filling Marshall's seat on the Supreme Court. Thomas's confirmation hearings were bitter and intensely fought, centering on an accusation that he had sexually harassed Anita Hill, a subordinate at the Department of Education and the EEOC. The Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52–48, the narrowest margin in a century.
Since the death of Antonin Scalia, Thomas has been the Court's foremost originalist, stressing what he considers the original meaning in interpreting the U.S. Constitution. Until 2020, Thomas was known for his silence during most oral arguments, though he has since begun asking more questions to counsel. He is notable for his majority opinions in Good News Club v. Milford Central School (determining the freedom of religious speech in relation to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (affirming the individual right to bear arms outside the home), as well as his dissent in Gonzales v. Raich (where he argued that the U.S. Congress may not criminalize the private cultivation of medical cannabis). He is widely considered to be the Court's most conservative justice.
Early life
Thomas was born on June 23, 1948, in his parents' wooden shack in Pin Point, Georgia. Pin Point was a small community near Savannah founded by freedmen in the 1880s. He was the second of three children of M.C. Thomas, a farm worker, and Leola Williams. Williams had been born out of wedlock; after her mother's death, she was sent from Liberty County, Georgia, to live with an aunt in Pin Point. The family were descendants of enslaved people and spoke the creole language Gullah as a first language. Thomas's older sister, Emma, was born in 1946, and his younger brother, Myers, in 1949. His earliest known ancestors were slaves named Sandy and Peggy, who were born in the late 18th century and owned by wealthy planter Josiah Wilson of Liberty County. Sandy Wilson, his distant ancestor, was an enslaved plantation worker who was brought from Georgia to Charleston, South Carolina, and, after the end of the Civil War, registered to vote in 1867.
Upon becoming pregnant with Thomas's older sister, Leola was expelled from her Baptist church and dropped out of high school after the 10th grade; her father ordered her to marry M.C. in January 1947. After three years of marriage, M.C. sued for divorce, claiming that Leola neglected the children, and a judge granted the request in March 1951. After the divorce, M.C. moved to Savannah and later Pennsylvania, visiting his children only once. Leola went to work as a maid in Savannah during the week and returned to Pin Point on the weekends. Custody of the children was awarded to Leola's aunt.
When her aunt's house burned down in 1955, Leola took her children to live with her in the room she rented in a tenement with an outdoor toilet in Savannah, leaving her daughter with the aunt in Pin Point. She asked her father, Myers Anderson, for help. He initially refused but agreed after his wife threatened to throw him out. Thomas and his brother went to live with Anderson, his maternal grandfather, in 1955 and experienced amenities such as indoor plumbing and regular meals for the first time. Despite having little formal education, Anderson had built a successful business delivering coal, oil, and ice. When racial unrest led to widespread protest and marches in Savannah from 1960 to 1963, Anderson used his wealth to bail out demonstrators and took his grandchildren to meetings promoted by the NAACP. Thomas has described his grandfather as the person who has influenced his life the most.Anderson, a convert to Catholicism, sent Thomas to be educated at a series of Catholic schools. Thomas attended the predominantly black St. Pius X High School in Chatham County for two years before transferring to St. John Vianney's Minor Seminary on the Isle of Hope, where he was the segregated boarding school's first black student. Though he experienced hazing, he performed well academically. He spent many hours at the Carnegie Library, the only library for Blacks in Savannah before libraries were desegregated in 1961.
When Thomas was 10 years old, Anderson began putting his grandsons to work during the summers, helping him build a house on a plot of farmland he owned, building fences, and doing farm work. He believed in hard work and self-reliance, never showed his grandsons affection, beat them frequently according to Leola, and impressed the importance of a good education on them. Anderson taught Thomas that "all of our rights as human beings came from God, not man", and that racial segregation was a violation of divine law.
College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School
In 1967, Thomas, the first in his family to attend college, entered Conception Seminary College, a Benedictine seminary in Missouri, intending to become a priest. After Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, he overheard a fellow student say, "Good. I hope the son of a bitch dies" and "[t]hat's what they should do to all the niggers". The display of racism moved Thomas to leave the seminary. He thought the church did not do enough to combat racism and resolved to abandon the priesthood. He left at the end of the semester.
At a nun's suggestion, Thomas enrolled at the College of the Holy Cross, an elite Catholic college in Massachusetts, as a sophomore transfer student on a full academic scholarship. He was one of the college's first black students, being one of twenty recruited by President John E. Brooks in 1968 in a group that also included the future attorney Ted Wells, the running back Eddie Jenkins Jr., and the novelist Edward P. Jones. In the fall of 1968, Thomas and other black students founded the college's Black Student Union (BSU), which became an important part of their campus identity. Without financial support from his grandfather, he defrayed his expenses by working as a waiter and dishwasher in the college's dining hall. Thomas later recalled, "I was 19. My only hope was Holy Cross".
Professors at Holy Cross remembered Thomas as a determined, diligent student. He kept to a strict routine of studying alone and stayed on campus during holidays to continue working. Thomas C. Lawler, an English professor at Holy Cross, recalled him as having "never talked very much in class. He was the kind of person you really might not notice". By contrast, he was outspoken at BSU meetings, distinguishing himself as a contrarian who often feuded with Ted Wells. Eddie Jenkins, a BSU member, said Thomas "could turn on a dime and reduce you to intellectual rubble". Edward P. Jones, who lived across from Thomas as a sophomore, recalled, "there was a fierce determination I sensed from him, that he was going to get as much as he could and get as far, ultimately, as he could".
Thomas became a vocal student activist as an undergraduate. He became acquainted with black separatism, the black Muslim Movement, and the black power movement, and displayed a poster of Malcolm X in his dormitory room. When some black students were disproportionately punished for violations, he suggested a walkout in protest. The BSU adopted his idea and Thomas left campus along with 60 other black students. Some of the priests negotiated with the protesting black students, allowing them to reenter the school. When administrators granted amnesty to all protesters, Thomas returned to the college and later attended antiwar marches. In April 1970, he participated in the violent 1970 Harvard Square riots. He has attributed his turn toward conservatism and subsequent disillusionment with leftist movements to these protests.
Having struggled with English as a native speaker of Gullah, Thomas majored in English literature. He became a member of Alpha Sigma Nu, the Jesuit honor society, and the Purple Key Society, of which he was the only black member. The college's focus on a liberal arts education introduced him to the writings of black intellectuals such as Richard Wright, whose literary work Thomas sympathized with. His admiration of Malcolm X led him to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X to the point of wearing down his copy's pages.
On June 4, 1971, Thomas graduated cum laude from Holy Cross with a Bachelor of Arts, ranked ninth in his class. He then applied to and was accepted by Yale Law School and Harvard Law School. He chose Yale, where he became one of only 12 black law students. The school had offered him the best financial aid package, and he was attracted to the civil rights activism of some of its faculty members. Finding it difficult to keep up with the school's expectations, Thomas struggled to connect with students from upper-class backgrounds. He enrolled in Yale's most difficult courses and became a student of the property law scholar Quintin Johnstone, his favorite professor. Johnstone remembered Thomas as having "performed very well". Guido Calabresi, the dean of Yale Law School, called Thomas and fellow student Hillary Clinton "both excellent students [who] had the same kind of reputation".
Under Johnstone's supervision, Thomas completed his law school senior dissertation, a thesis on bar exams, and received honors. He graduated from Yale with his Juris Doctor in 1974. After graduation, he sought to enter private practice as a corporate lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia. Because prospective law firms assumed he was accepted because of affirmative action, he was disappointed with his experience at Yale. Thomas thought the law firms "asked pointed questions, unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated". In his 2007 memoir, he wrote: "I peeled a fifteen-cent sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it on the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I'd made by going to Yale. I never did change my mind about its value." Hill, Jones, and Farrington, the Savannah law firm where Thomas had interned the previous summer, offered him a job upon graduation, but he declined.
Early legal career
With no job offers from major law firms, Thomas took a position as an associate with Missouri Attorney General John Danforth, who offered him the prospect of practicing what he liked. Thomas moved to Saint Louis to study for the Missouri bar, and was admitted on September 13, 1974. He remained financially destitute even after leaving Yale, trying unsuccessfully on one occasion to make money by selling his blood at a blood bank, and hoped that by working for Danforth he might later acquire a job in private practice.
From 1974 to 1977, Thomas was an assistant attorney general of Missouri—the only African-American member of Danforth's staff. He worked first in the office's criminal appeals division and later in the revenue and taxation division. Thomas conducted lawsuits independently, gaining a reputation as a fair but controversial prosecutor. Years later, after he joined the Supreme Court, Thomas recalled his position in Missouri as "the best job I've ever had".
When Danforth was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976, Thomas left to become an attorney in Monsanto's legal department in Saint Louis. He found the job unsatisfying, so left to rejoin Danforth in Washington, D.C., as a legislative assistant. From 1979 to 1981, he handled energy issues for the Senate Commerce Committee. As a black conservative who had switched his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican while working for Danforth in Missouri, Thomas soon drew the attention of officials in the newly elected Reagan Administration. Pendleton James, Reagan's personnel director, offered Thomas the position of assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education. Initially reluctant, Thomas agreed after Danforth and others pressed him to take the post.
On May 1, 1981, President Ronald Reagan nominated Thomas as assistant secretary of education for the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The Senate received the nomination on May 28, and Thomas was quickly confirmed before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee on June 19, succeeding Cynthia Brown at age 32. He held the position for a brief period before James offered him a new position as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a promotion that Thomas believed, as with his position in the OCR, was because of his race. After James consulted the president, Thomas hesitantly took up the chair with Reagan's approval.
Thomas chaired the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) from 1982 to 1990. As chairman, he was tasked with enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in an agency that had been mutually resented by both Democrats and Republicans. He announced a reorganization of the EEOC and upgraded its record-keeping under an uncompromising leadership that eschewed racial quotas. Concerned by the EEOC's limited statutory authority, Thomas sought to impose criminal penalties for employers who practiced employment discrimination, moving to shift funding towards agency investigators. Though he had been critical of affirmative action, Thomas also opposed the Reagan Administration's agenda to remove affirmative action policies, believing it to be a detraction from socioeconomic issues.
During Thomas's tenure, he was credited with improving the efficiency of the EEOC. Settlement award amounts to victims of discrimination tripled, while the number of suits filed decreased. The EEOC's lack of goals and timetables drew criticism from civil rights advocates, who lobbied representatives to review the EEOC's practices; Thomas testified before Congress more than 50 times. Near the end of his tenure, the EEOC came under congressional scrutiny for mishandling age-discrimination cases.
D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals
In early 1989, President George H. W. Bush expressed interest in nominating Thomas to a federal judgeship. Thomas, now at age 41, initially rejected the position, believing himself unready to make a lifetime commitment to being a judge. White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray and White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu advocated for his nomination, and Judge Laurence Silberman advised Thomas to accept an appointment. Anticipating Thomas's nomination, a liberal coalition—including the Alliance for Justice and the National Organization for Women (NOW)—emerged to oppose his candidacy.
On October 30, 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to fill the seat vacated by Robert Bork. Thomas gained the support of other African American officials, including former transportation secretary William Coleman, and said that when meeting white Democratic staffers in the United States Senate, he was "struck by how easy it had become for sanctimonious whites to accuse a black man of not caring about civil rights".
In February 1990, the Senate Judiciary Committee recommended Thomas by a vote of 12 to 1. On March 6, 1990, the Senate confirmed him to the Court of Appeals by a vote of 98 to 2. He developed cordial relationships during his 19 months on the federal court, including with Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg. At age 42, Thomas was also the D.C. Circuit's youngest judge. During his judgeship, Thomas authored 19 opinions. A colleague on the D.C. Circuit described him as "talkative, gregarious on our court, [and] a real participant". He ruled in 145 cases, many of which concerned criminal matters.
Nomination to the Supreme Court
When Justice William Brennan retired from the Supreme Court in July 1990, Thomas was Bush's favorite among the five candidates on his shortlist for the position. However, Bush's advisors, including Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, considered Thomas inexperienced, and he instead nominated David Souter of the First Circuit Court of Appeals. A year later, Justice Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement on June 27, 1991, and Bush nominated Thomas to replace him. Bush announced his selection on July 1, calling Thomas the "best qualified at this time". Thornburgh cautioned Bush that replacing Marshall with any candidate who was not perceived to share Marshall's views would make confirmation difficult.
Liberal interest groups sought to challenge Thomas's nomination by paralleling the same strategy used against Robert Bork's confirmation. Abortion-rights groups, including the National Abortion Rights Action League and the NOW, were concerned that Thomas would be among those to overrule Roe v. Wade. Republican officials emphasized his personal history and gathered support from African American interest groups, including the NAACP. Other civil rights organizations, such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Urban League, were convinced not to oppose Thomas, believing that he was Bush's last black nominee. On July 31, 1991, the board of directors of the NAACP voted against endorsing Thomas, announcing their opposition to his confirmation the same day.
The American Bar Association (ABA) appraised Thomas as "qualified" for the Supreme Court. The result came in contrast to the "well qualified" rating some nominees had received previously. The Bush Administration anticipated that the organization would rate Thomas more poorly than it thought he deserved, so pressured the ABA for at least the mid-level qualified rating while simultaneously discrediting it as partisan. Opponents of Thomas's nomination saw the assessment as indicating that he was unfit for the Court. The ABA gave Thomas its highest rankings in integrity and judicial temperament and a middle-grade in professional competence.
On September 10, 1991, formal confirmation hearings began before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Thomas testified for 25 hours, the second-longest of any Supreme Court nominee. He was reticent when answering senators' questions, recalling what had happened to Robert Bork when Bork expounded on his judicial philosophy during his confirmation hearings four years earlier. As many of his earlier writings frequently referenced natural law, his views on the legal theory became a focus of the hearings. Thomas said he regarded natural law as a "philosophical background" to the Constitution.
Ninety witnesses testified in favor of or against Thomas. A motion on September 27, 1991, to give the nomination a favorable recommendation failed 7–7, and the Judiciary Committee voted 13–1 to send it to the full Senate without recommendation.
Anita Hill accusations
At the conclusion of the committee's confirmation hearings, the Senate was debating whether to give final approval to Thomas's nomination. An FBI interview with Anita Hill, a former colleague of Thomas at the EEOC, was soon leaked to the press and allegations of sexual harassment followed. As a result, on October 8, the final vote was postponed, and the confirmation hearings were reopened. It was only the third time in the Senate's history that such an action was taken and the first since 1925, when Justice Harlan F. Stone's nomination was recommitted to the Judiciary Committee.
Hill was raised in Oklahoma and, like Thomas, graduated from Yale Law School. She told James Brudney, a fellow Yale alumnus, about alleged sexual advances Thomas had made, telling him that she also did not wish to testify or make the allegations public to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Hill asked the staff of Senator Joe Biden, the chair of the committee, to make her allegations anonymously if she chose to testify and that Thomas not be informed of them; Biden declined. Hill then notified Democratic staffers the day after the hearings had ended that she wished to make her allegations known to the committee.
Hill's allegations were corroborated by Susan Hoerchner, a judge in California, who also wished to remain anonymous. Hoerchner called Harriet Grant, a chief counsel to Biden, to inform him of her allegations. She recalled that Thomas told Hill in an elevator at the EEOC that he would ruin her career if she spoke about his behavior. When Grant told Hill and Hoerchner that the FBI would be involved, they were reluctant to be investigated. Hill declined to speak with the FBI, as she feared it would misconstrue her words, so she arranged to deliver a written statement. The statement described how Thomas pressured her to date him, and included descriptions of him speaking about sexual interests involving pornographic films. Hill also alleged that Thomas spoke of sex at work despite her discomfort with the subject, adding, "I sensed that my discomfort with his discussions only urged him on, as though my reaction of feeling ill at ease and vulnerable was what he wanted".
The FBI report of its investigation was not made public. The White House announced that the FBI had found the allegations "without foundation". Congressional officials who saw the report told The New York Times that "the bureau could not draw any conclusion because of the 'he said, she said' nature of the subject". The use of the FBI was contentious in the Judiciary Committee because it answers to the president, who was sponsoring Thomas. Biden used the FBI instead of the committee's investigators to avoid the appearance of partisanship.
Second hearing
The hearings reconvened on October 11, 1991, with Thomas going first. In his opening statement, he denied that he had said or done anything to Hill "that could have been mistaken for sexual harassment". He told the Committee that he would not allow any questions about "what goes on in the most intimate parts of my private life or the sanctity of my bedroom" so as not to "provide the rope for my own lynching".
The committee then questioned Hill for seven hours. She testified that ten years earlier Thomas had subjected her to comments of a sexual nature, calling it "behavior that is unbefitting an individual who will be a member of the Court". Her testimony included graphic details, and some senators questioned her aggressively. Hill accused Thomas of making two sexually offensive remarks to her: comparing his penis to that of Long Dong Silver, a black porn star, and saying he had discovered a pubic hair on his Coca-Cola can.
In the evening, Thomas was recalled before the committee. He again denied the allegations and was prompted by Senator Orrin Hatch's questioning to launch a speech that criticized the proceeding as a "high-tech lynching for uppity blacks". The speech resonated with Southern blacks and stimulated Thomas's supporters, with public opinion shifting in his favor afterward.
Hill was the only person to publicly testify that Thomas had sexually harassed her. Angela Wright, who worked under Thomas at the EEOC and had alleged that "Thomas had continually pressured her to date him and made sexual comments about women's bodies", and a corroborating witness she had named were not called to testify. Their written depositions were entered into the congressional records unrebutted. Sukari Hardnett, a former Thomas assistant, wrote to the Senate committee that although Thomas had not harassed her, "If you were young, black, female and reasonably attractive, you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female."
In addition to Hill and Thomas, the committee heard other witnesses. A former colleague, Nancy Altman, testified that for two years she had shared an office with Thomas at the Department of Education and "heard virtually every conversation" Thomas had and never heard him make a sexist or offensive comment.
After the confirmation hearings ended, they became a focus of divided scholarship, with authors who revisited them reaching varying conclusions in favor of either Thomas or Hill.
Senate votes
On October 15, 1991, the Senate voted to confirm Thomas as an associate justice, 52–48. Thomas received the votes of 41 Republicans and 11 Democrats, while 46 Democrats and two Republicans voted to reject his nomination. As of 2024, Thomas is the most recent Supreme Court justice to be confirmed by a Senate controlled by the opposing party of the appointing president.
The 99 days during which Thomas's nomination was pending in the Senate was the second-longest of the 16 nominees receiving a final vote since 1975, second only to Bork's 108 days. The vote to confirm Thomas was the narrowest margin for approval in more than 100 years.
Thomas received his commission on October 23 and took the prescribed constitutional and judicial oaths of office, becoming the Court's 106th justice. He was sworn in by Justice Byron White in a ceremony initially scheduled for October 21, which was postponed because of the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist's wife, Natalie. His first set of law clerks included future judges Gregory Katsas and Gregory Maggs and U.S. Ambassador Christopher Landau.
Supreme Court of the United States
After joining the Supreme Court, Thomas emerged as a member of the Court's conservative wing. He aligned himself with Justice Antonin Scalia, with whom he shared an originalist approach to constitutional interpretation, and sided with him in 92% of cases during his first 13 years on the bench. Over time, Thomas and Scalia's jurisprudence separated, with Thomas favoring stronger emphasis on the Constitution's original understanding and demonstrating greater willingness to overrule precedent. His appointment represented a decline in the Court's liberal wing, which then comprised only Justices John Paul Stevens and Harry Blackmun.
In his early days on the Court, Thomas adopted a bold style of legal jurisprudence that alienated him from Justices Blackmun and Sandra Day O'Connor. He became the subject of intense media criticism for his decisions, including from figures that supported his appointment. Having previously experienced scrutiny during his confirmation hearings, Thomas believed in producing results without regard for his public image, a characteristic embodied in his lack of questions during oral arguments. His conservative approach moved O'Connor to take liberal positions but attracted Scalia. He formed a friendship with Justice Byron White, with whom he shared multiple interests, and found support from Justice David Souter.
Thomas is a proponent of original meaning, incorporating what had been Scalia's narrower approach to the doctrine and the original intent of the Framers of the Constitution, including those espoused in the Declaration of Independence. As a means to impartiality, he is an advocate of judicial restraint to limit judicial discretion. Thomas has been the most-willing of all justices on the Court to overrule precedent; according to Scalia, "he does not believe in stare decisis, period". By October 1, 2012, he had written 475 opinions, including 171 majority opinions, 138 concurrences, and 166 dissenting opinions—approximately 10 percent of the 1,772 cases the Court had decided since he was elevated. In 2016, Thomas wrote nearly twice as many opinions as any other justice.
Thomas has been called the most conservative member of the Supreme Court, though others gave Scalia that designation while they served on the Court together. Thomas's influence, particularly among conservatives, was perceived to have significantly increased during Donald Trump's presidency, and Trump appointed many of his former clerks to political positions and judgeships. As the Supreme Court became more conservative, Thomas and his legal views became more influential on the Court. This influence increased further by 2022, with Thomas authoring an opinion expanding Second Amendment rights and contributing to the Court's overruling of Roe v. Wade. He was also the most senior associate justice by that time. During Trump's second presidency, Thomas swore in multiple cabinet officials.
Government powers and legal structure
Court precedent
Thomas believes the Court should not follow erroneous precedent, a view not currently held by other justices. He has called to reconsider New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), and criticized Roe v. Wade (1973) and Gideon v. Wainwright (1963). At a 2013 Federalist Society dinner, Judge Diane S. Sykes asked Thomas whether "stare decisis doesn't hold much force for you?" He responded, "Oh, it sure does, but not enough to keep me from going to the Constitution". In 2019, The New York Times reported that data gathered by political scientist Stephen L. Wasby of the University at Albany found that Thomas wrote "more than 250 concurring or dissenting opinions seriously questioning precedents, calling for their reconsideration or suggesting that they be overruled".
In the 2010 gun regulation case McDonald v. City of Chicago, Thomas sought to repeal past precedents and insisted that "stare decisis is only an 'adjunct' of our duty as judges to decide by our best lights what the Constitution means". In Gamble v. United States (2019), he joined the majority opinion, which revisited an exception to the Double Jeopardy Clause, writing separately to state his position against the Court's prevailing view of multi-factor analysis regarding whether to follow precedent:In my view, if the Court encounters a decision that is demonstrably erroneous—i.e., one that is not a permissible interpretation of the text—the Court should correct the error, regardless of whether other factors support overruling the precedent. Federal courts may (but need not) adhere to an incorrect decision as precedent, but only when traditional tools of legal interpretation show that the earlier decision adopted a textually permissible interpretation of the law. A demonstrably incorrect judicial decision, by contrast, is tantamount to making law, and adhering to it both disregards the supremacy of the Constitution and perpetuates a usurpation of the legislative power.In Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt (2019), Thomas wrote the 5–4 decision overruling Nevada v. Hall (1979), which said states could be sued in courts of other states. In his majority opinion, he noted that stare decisis "is not an inexorable command". Thomas explicitly disavowed the concept of reliance interests as justification for adhering to precedent. In dissent from Hyatt III, Justice Breyer asked what other decisions might eventually be overruled, and suggested Roe v. Wade might be among them. Breyer stated that it is best to leave precedents alone unless they are widely seen as erroneous or become impractical.
Executive power
Thomas has supported a broad interpretation of executive power and has theorized about its constitutional aspects. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), he dissented from the majority opinion, arguing that courts should have had complete deference to the executive decision to determine that Yaser Esam Hamdi was an enemy combatant. He wrote in Hamdi that the president does not have the singular authority to detain a citizen who was captured while in enemy service. In addition, Thomas noted that "structural advantages [of the Presidency] are most important in the national-security and foreign-affairs contexts" and thus "the Founders intended that the President have primary responsibility—along with the necessary power—to protect the national security and to conduct the nation's foreign relations".