Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution.

• Author: Miller, Mark
• Position: Book review

Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

by Myron Magnet

For readers only passingly familiar with the life and jurisprudence of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Myron Magnet's new book, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution, provides a brief but thoughtful introduction to both. Magnet, the longtime editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, covers the life and career of the Supreme Court's leading iconoclast in a manner worthy of his subject.

In this biography-slash-constitutional-commentary, Magnet reconciles Thomas' life with Thomas' outlook on the law, and he does so in under 150 pages. Magnet also demonstrates how the "progressive" view of a "living constitution" has created a Supreme Court that often acts more like an ongoing meeting of a perpetual constitutional convention, rather than an interpreter of text and original meaning of the "lost constitution." In Thomas, Magnet has a justice who refutes the "living constitution" approach that held sway for so long but now arguably finds itself in retreat --not losing every skirmish, but decidedly losing the war.

Magnet begins with Thomas' grandfather. Myers Anderson, who Thomas himself paid tribute to in his autobiography, My Grandfather's Son, taught Thomas in part by way of aphorisms, including: "Old Man Can't is dead--I helped bury him." Anderson's dusk-to-dawn work ethic inscribed upon Thomas' heart a similar work ethic that manifests itself in the way Thomas annually writes many more opinions, sometimes twice as many, as any of his colleagues.

Anderson sent Thomas to Catholic schools run by Irish nuns during Thomas' formative years growing up in Savannah. "There was always this underlying sense that we were entitled to be a full participant in We the People," Magnet quotes Thomas as saying. "That was the way the nuns, who were all immigrants, explained it to us. There was never any doubt that we were inherently equal--it said so in the Declaration of Independence."

But for Thomas, equality of opportunity for all does not translate to equality of outcome because the only way to reach equal outcomes would be to ascribe...