title: Starlink

text: On 26 February 2022, Elon Musk announced that the Starlink satellites had become active over Ukraine after a request from the Ukrainian government to replace internet services destroyed during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. By 6 April 2022, SpaceX had sent over 5000 Starlink terminals to Ukraine to allow Ukrainians access to the Starlink network; SpaceX had donated 3667 or 73% of the 5000 terminals and removed the monthly service fees, and USAID had purchased the balance of the terminals. According to "The Washington Post", The Starlink equipment sent to Ukraine was funded by SpaceX including partial funding by the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as the governments of France and Poland. By mid August, Ukraine internet service was being provided by more than 20,000 Starlink terminals, some from foreign partners and volunteers, in addition to many provided directly by SpaceX. During the war, Ukrainians can use Starlink terminals without paying the normal monthly subscription fee; by year-end, Musk estimated the cost of Starlink's donation at $20 million per month.


title: Starlink

text: In May 2022 a Starlink-enabled Ukrainian Internet App was the key component of a successful new artillery fire coordination system. While military and government use of the Starlink has been the most important aspect of opening Ukraine to low-altitude satellite internet services in early 2022, civilians are also heavily using the technology "to keep in touch with the outside world and tell loved ones that they are alive."


title: Starlink

text: On September 30, Ukrainian forces reported major Starlink outages across the frontline, resulting in "catastrophic" losses of communication. CNN reported Starlink services had to be requested by Ukrainian forces as new areas were liberated.


title: Starlink

text: FIFA and Qatar Airways partnered with SpaceX on a falcon 9 mission. On Eutelsat Hotbird 13F mission (launched in October 2022), the first stage B1069.3 included a hosted promotional payload by FIFA, that was a box powered by starlink containing 2 Adidas Al Rihla balls, that were to be used in 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. These match balls were launched and brought back by landing on the droneship surviving the stresses of the booster. Later, they were taken out and shipped back to Qatar for the world cup. This was actually the first payload on a Falcon 9 booster and thus showed the ease of reusability.


title: Starlink

text: The balls' flight by SpaceX was, in part, a promotion for the company's Starlink satellite internet service. An associated website invited World Cup attendees to visit the Starlink office in Doha.


title: Starlink

text: In order to offer satellite services in any nation-state, International Telecommunication Union (ITU) regulations and long-standing international treaties require that landing rights be granted by each country jurisdiction, and within a country, by the national communications regulators. As a result, even though the Starlink network has near-global reach at latitudes below approximately 60°, broadband services can only be provided in 40 countries as of September 2022. SpaceX can also have business operation and economic considerations that may make a difference in which countries Starlink service is offered, in which order, and how soon. For example, SpaceX formally requested authorization for Canada only in June 2020, the Canadian regulatory authority approved it in November 2020, and SpaceX rolled out service two months later, in January 2021. As of September 2022, Starlink services were on offer in 40 countries, with applications pending regulatory approval in many more.


title: Starlink

text: Japan's major mobile provider, KDDI, announced a partnership with SpaceX to begin offering in 2022 expanded connectivity for its rural mobile customers via 1,200 remote mobile towers.


title: Starlink

text: On 25 April 2022, Hawaiian Airlines announced an agreement with Starlink to provide free internet access on its aircraft, becoming the first airline to use Starlink. By July 2022, Starlink internet service was available in 36 countries and 41 markets.


title: Starlink

text: In May 2022, it was announced that regulatory approval had been granted for Nigeria, Mozambique, and the Philippines.


title: Starlink

text: The Internet communication satellites were expected to be in the smallsat-class of -mass, and were intended to be in low Earth orbit (LEO) at an altitude of approximately , according to early public releases of information in 2015. In the event, the first large deployment of 60 satellites in May 2019 were and SpaceX decided to place the satellites at a relatively low , due to concerns about the space environment. Initial plans were for the constellation to be made up of approximately 4,000 cross-linked satellites, more than twice as many operational satellites as were in orbit in January 2015.


title: Starlink

text: The satellites will employ optical inter-satellite links and phased array beam-forming and digital processing technologies in the Ku and Ka microwave bands "(super high frequency [SHF] to extremely high frequency [EHF])", according to documents filed with the U.S. FCC. While specifics of the phased array technologies have been disclosed as part of the frequency application, SpaceX enforced confidentiality regarding details of the optical inter-satellite links. Early satellites were launched without laser links. The inter-satellite laser links were successfully tested in late 2020.


title: Starlink

text: The satellites will be mass-produced, at a much lower cost per unit of capability than previously existing satellites. Musk said, "We're going to try and do for satellites what we've done for rockets." "In order to revolutionize space, we have to address both satellites and rockets." "Smaller satellites are crucial to lowering the cost of space-based Internet and communications".


title: Starlink

text: In February 2015, SpaceX asked the FCC to consider future innovative uses of the Ka-band spectrum before the FCC commits to 5G communications regulations that would create barriers to entry, since SpaceX is a new entrant to the satellite communications market. The SpaceX non-geostationary orbit communications satellite constellation will operate in the high-frequency bands above 24 GHz, "where steerable Earth station transmit antennas would have a wider geographic impact, and significantly lower satellite altitudes magnify the impact of aggregate interference from terrestrial transmissions".


title: Starlink

text: Internet traffic via a geostationary satellite has a minimum theoretical round-trip latency of at least 477 milliseconds (ms; between user and ground gateway), but in practice, current satellites have latencies of 600 ms or more. Starlink satellites are orbiting at to of the height of geostationary orbits, and thus offer more practical Earth-to-sat latencies of around 25 to 35 ms, comparable to existing cable and fiber networks. The system will use a peer-to-peer protocol claimed to be "simpler than IPv6", it will also incorporate end-to-end encryption natively.


title: Starlink

text: Starlink satellites use Hall-effect thrusters with krypton gas as the reaction mass for orbit raising and station keeping. Krypton Hall thrusters tend to exhibit significantly higher erosion of the flow channel compared to a similar electric propulsion system operated with xenon, but krypton is much more abundant and has a lower market price.


title: Starlink

text: The system does not directly connect from its satellites to handsets (like the constellations from Iridium, Globalstar, Thuraya and Inmarsat). Instead, it is linked to flat user terminals the size of a pizza box, which will have phased array antennas and track the satellites. The terminals can be mounted anywhere, as long as they can see the sky. This includes fast-moving objects like trains. Photographs of the customer antennas were first seen on the internet in June 2020, supporting earlier statements by SpaceX CEO Musk that the terminals would look like a "UFO on a stick. Starlink Terminal has motors to self-adjust optimal angle to view sky". The antenna is known internally as "Dishy McFlatface".


title: Starlink

text: In October 2020, SpaceX launched a paid-for beta service in the U.S. called "Better Than Nothing Beta", charging $499 for a user terminal, with an expected service of "50 Mbps to 150 Mbps and latency from 20 ms to 40 ms over the next several months". From January 2021, the paid-for beta service was extended to other continents, starting with the United Kingdom.


title: Starlink

text: A larger, high-performance version of the antenna is available for use with the "Starlink Business" service tier.


title: Starlink

text: In September 2020, SpaceX applied for permission to put terminals on 10 of its ships with the expectation of entering the maritime market in the future.


title: Starlink

text: SpaceX has made applications to the FCC for at least 32 ground stations in United States, and has approvals for five of them (in five states). Starlink uses the Ka-band to connect with ground stations.


title: Starlink

text: According to their filing, SpaceX's ground stations would also be installed on-site at Google data-centers world-wide.


title: Starlink

text: MicroSat-1a and MicroSat-1b were originally slated to be launched into circular orbits at approximately 86.4° inclination, and to include panchromatic video imager cameras to film images of Earth and the satellite. The two satellites, "MicroSat-1a" and "MicroSat-1b" were meant to be launched together as secondary payloads on one of the Iridium-NEXT flights, but they were instead used for ground-based tests.


title: Starlink

text: At the time of the June 2015 announcement, SpaceX had stated plans to launch the first two demonstration satellites in 2016, but the target date was subsequently moved out to 2018. SpaceX began flight testing their satellite technologies in 2018 with the launch of two test satellites. The two identical satellites were called MicroSat-2a and MicroSat-2b during development but were renamed Tintin A and Tintin B upon orbital deployment on 22 February 2018. The satellites were launched by a Falcon 9 rocket, and they were piggy-pack payloads launching with the Paz satellite.


title: Starlink

text: Tintin A and B were inserted into a orbit. Per FCC filings, they were intended to raise themselves to an orbit, the operational altitude for Starlink LEO satellites per the earliest regulatory filings, but stayed close to their original orbits. SpaceX announced in November 2018 that they would like to operate an initial shell of about 1600 satellites in the constellation at about orbital altitude, at an altitude similar to the orbits Tintin A and B stayed in.


title: Starlink

text: The satellites orbit in a circular low Earth orbit at about altitude in a high-inclination orbit for a planned six to twelve-month duration. The satellites communicate with three testing ground stations in Washington State and California for short-term experiments of less than ten minutes duration, roughly daily.


title: Starlink

text: The Starlink v1.0 satellites, launched since November 2019, have the following additional characteristics:


title: Starlink

text: The Starlink v1.5 satellites, launched since 24 January 2021, have the following additional characteristics:


title: Starlink

text: These are satellites buses with two solar arrays derived from starlinks v1.5 and v2.0 for military use and can host classified government or military payloads.


title: Starlink

text: SpaceX was preparing for the production of Starlink v2.0 satellites by early 2021. Starlink v2.0 satellites will be "almost an order of magnitude more capable than v1.0" in terms of communications bandwidth.


title: Starlink

text: SpaceX hopes to begin launching Starlink v2.0 in 2022. , SpaceX said publicly that all Gen2 Starlink sats would need to be launched on Starship, as they are too large to fit inside a Falcon 9 fairing. However, in August 2022, SpaceX made formal regulatory filings with the FCC that indicated they would build the Gen2 Starlinks in two different form factors: one with the components laid out in such a way that they could be launched in Falcon 9, and one laid out in the 7-meter long form factor that could only be launched on Starship. The smaller one is being planned as a backup, in the event that regular operational payload-delivery Starship launches do not occur as soon as SpaceX would like.


title: Starlink

text: Between February 2018 and 2022, SpaceX successfully launched 2,091 satellites into orbit. In March 2020, SpaceX reported producing six satellites per day.


title: Starlink

text: The deployment of the first 1,440 satellites was planned in 72 orbital planes of 20 satellites each, with a requested lower minimum elevation angle of beams to improve reception: 25° rather than the 40° of the other two orbital shells. SpaceX launched the first 60 satellites of the constellation in May 2019 into a orbit and expected up to six launches in 2019 at that time, with 720 satellites (12 × 60) for continuous coverage in 2020.


title: Starlink

text: Starlink satellites are also planned to launch on Starship, an under-development rocket of SpaceX with a much larger payload capability. The initial announcement included plans to launch 400 Starlink (version 1.0) satellites at a time. Current plans now call for Starship to be the only launch vehicle to be used to launch fewer of the much larger Starlink version 2.0.


title: Starlink

text: Contains all v0.9 and higher satellite generations. Tintin A and Tintin B as test satellites are not included.


title: Starlink

text: Early designs had all phase 1 satellites in altitudes of around . SpaceX initially requested to lower the first 1584 satellites, and in April 2020 requested to lower all other higher satellite orbits to about . In April 2020, SpaceX modified the architecture of the Starlink network. SpaceX submitted an application to the FCC proposing to operate more satellites in lower orbits in the first phase than the FCC previously authorized. The first phase will still include 1,440 satellites in the first shell orbiting at in planes inclined 53.0°, with no change to the first shell of the constellation launched largely in 2020. SpaceX also applied in the United States for use of the E-band in their constellation The FCC approved the application in April 2021.


title: Starlink

text: SpaceX previously had regulatory approval from the FCC to operate another 2,825 satellites in higher orbits between and , in orbital planes inclined at 53.8°, 70.0°, 74.0° and 81.0°.


title: Starlink

text: SpaceX released a new group of 10 Starlink satellites on 24 January 2021, the first Starlink satellites in polar orbits. The launch also surpassed ISRO's record of launching the most satellites in one mission (143), taking to 1,025 the cumulative number of satellites deployed for Starlink to that date.


title: Starlink

text: On 3 February 2022, 49 satellites were launched as Starlink Group 47. A G2-rated geomagnetic storm occurred on 4 February, caused the atmosphere to warm and density at the low deployment altitudes to increase. Predictions were that up to 40 of the 49 satellites might be lost to drag. In the event, 38 satellites reentered the atmosphere by 12 February while the remaining 11 were able to raise their orbits and avoid loss due to the storm.


title: Starlink

text: The planned large number of satellites has been met with criticism from the astronomical community because of concerns over light pollution. Astronomers claim that the number of visible satellites will outnumber visible stars and that their brightness in both optical and radio wavelengths will severely impact scientific observations. While astronomers can schedule observations to avoid pointing where satellites currently orbit, it is "getting more difficult" as more satellites come online. The International Astronomical Union (IAU), National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), and Square Kilometre Array Organization (SKAO) have released official statements expressing concern on the matter.


title: Starlink

text: On 20 November 2019, the four-meter (13') Blanco telescope of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) recorded strong signal loss and the appearance of 19 white lines on a DECam shot (right image). This image noise was correlated to the transit of a Starlink satellite train, launched a week earlier.


title: Starlink

text: SpaceX representatives and Musk have claimed that the satellites will have minimal impact, being easily mitigated by pixel masking and image stacking. However, professional astronomers have disputed these claims based on initial observation of the Starlink v0.9 satellites on the first launch, shortly after their deployment from the launch vehicle. In later statements on Twitter, Musk stated that SpaceX will work on reducing the albedo of the satellites and will provide on-demand orientation adjustments for astronomical experiments, if necessary. One Starlink satellite (Starlink 1130 / DarkSat) launched with an experimental coating to reduce its albedo. The reduction in g-band magnitude is 0.8 magnitude (55%). Despite these measures, astronomers found that the satellites were still too bright thus making DarkSat essentially a "dead end".


title: Starlink

text: On 17 April 2020, SpaceX wrote in an FCC filing that it would test new methods of mitigating light pollution, and also provide access to satellite tracking data for astronomers to "better coordinate their observations with our satellites". On 27 April 2020, Musk announced that the company would introduce a new sunshade designed to reduce the brightness of Starlink satellites. , over 200 Starlink satellites had a sunshade. An October 2020 analysis found them to be only marginally fainter than DarkSat. A January 2021 study pinned the brightness at 31% of the original design.


title: Starlink

text: According to a May 2021 study, "The large number of fast-moving transmitting stations (i.e. satellites) will cause further interference. New analysis methods could mitigate some of these effects, but data loss is inevitable, increasing the time needed for each study and limiting the overall amount of science done".


title: Starlink

text: In February 2022, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) established a center to help astronomers deal with the adverse effects of satellite constellations such as Starlink. Work will include the development of software tools for astronomers, advancement of national and international policies, community outreach and work with industry on relevant technologies.


title: Starlink

text: In June 2022, the IAU released a website for astronomers to deal with some adverse effects via satellite tracking. This will enable astronomers to be able to track satellites to be able to avoid and time them for minimal impact on current work.


title: Starlink

text: The large number of satellites employed by Starlink may create long-term danger of space debris resulting from placing thousands of satellites in orbit and the risk of causing a satellite collision, potentially triggering a phenomenon known as Kessler syndrome. SpaceX has said that most of the satellites are launched at a lower altitude, and failed satellites are expected to deorbit within five years without propulsion.


title: Starlink

text: Early in the program, a near-miss occurred when SpaceX did not move a satellite that had a 1 in 1,000 chance of colliding with a European one, ten times higher than ESA's threshold for avoidance maneuvers. SpaceX subsequently fixed an issue with its paging system that had disrupted emails between ESA and SpaceX. ESA said it plans to invest in technologies to automate satellite collision avoidance maneuvers. In 2021, Chinese authorities lodged a complaint with the United Nations, saying their space station had performed evasive maneuvers that year to avoid Starlink satellites. In the document, Chinese delegates said that the continuously maneuvering Starlink satellites posed a risk of collision, and two close encounters with the satellites in July and October constituted dangers to the life or health of astronauts aboard the Chinese Tiangong space station.


title: Starlink

text: All these reported issues, plus current plans for the extension of the constellation, motivated a formal letter from National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) on behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the


title: Starlink

text: National Science Foundation (NSF), submitted to FCC on 8 February 2022, warning about the potential impact on LEO orbit, increased collision risk, impact on science missions, rocket launches, International Space Station and Radio frequencies Interferences. Resting credibility on the arguments for collision self-avoidance reported by SpaceX.


title: Starlink

text: In addition to the OneWeb constellation, announced nearly concurrently with the SpaceX constellation, a 2015 proposal from Samsung outlined a 4,600-satellite constellation orbiting at that could provide a zettabyte per month capacity worldwide, an equivalent of 200 gigabytes per month for 5 billion users of Internet data, but by 2020, no more public information had been released about the Samsung constellation. Telesat announced a smaller 117 satellite constellation in 2015 with plans to deliver initial service in 2021. Amazon announced a large broadband internet satellite constellation in April 2019, planning to launch 3,236 satellites in the next decade in what the company calls "Project Kuiper", a satellite constellation that will work in concert with Amazon's previously announced large network of twelve satellite ground station facilities (the "AWS ground station unit") announced in November 2018.


title: Starlink

text: In February 2015, financial analysts questioned established geosynchronous orbit communications satellite fleet operators as to how they intended to respond to the competitive threat of SpaceX and OneWeb LEO communication satellites. In October 2015, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell indicated that while development continues, the business case for the long-term rollout of an operational satellite network was still in an early phase.


title: Starlink

text: By October 2017, the expectation for large increases in satellite network capacity from emerging lower-altitude broadband constellations caused market players to cancel some planned investments in new geosynchronous orbit broadband communications satellites.


title: Starlink

text: SpaceX was challenged regarding Starlink in February 2021 when the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), a political interest group representing traditional rural internet service providers, urged the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to "actively, and aggressively, and thoughtfully vet" the subsidy applications of SpaceX and other broadband providers. At the time, SpaceX had provisionally won $886 million for a commitment to provide service to approximately 643,000 locations in 35 states as part of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). The NRECA criticisms included that the funding allocation to Starlink would include service to locations—such as Harlem and terminals at Newark Liberty International Airport and Miami International Airport—that are not rural, and because SpaceX was planning to build the infrastructure and serve any customers who request service with or without the FCC subsidy. Additionally, Jim Matheson, chief executive officer of the NRECA voiced concern about technologies that had not yet been proven to meet the high speeds required for the award category. Starlink was specifically criticized for being still in beta testing and an unproven technology.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Clarence Thomas (born June 23, 1948) is an American jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President George H. W. Bush to succeed Thurgood Marshall and has served since 1991. After Marshall, Thomas is the second African American to serve on the Court and its longest-serving member since Anthony Kennedy's retirement in 2018.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: 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. Growing up as a devout Catholic, Thomas originally intended to be a priest in the Catholic Church but was frustrated over the church's insufficient attempts to combat racism. He abandoned his aspiration of becoming a clergyman to attend the College of the Holy Cross and, later, Yale Law School, where he was influenced by a number of conservative authors, notably Thomas Sowell, who dramatically shifted his worldview from progressive to conservative. Upon graduating, he was appointed as an assistant attorney general in Missouri and later entered private practice there. He became a legislative assistant to 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.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: 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. Hill alleged that Thomas made multiple sexual and romantic overtures to her despite her repeatedly telling him to stop. Thomas and his supporters denied the allegation, asserting that Hill and her political supporters had fabricated the accusation to prevent the appointment of a black conservative to the Court. The Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52–48—the narrowest margin in a century.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Since the death of Antonin Scalia, Thomas has been the Court's foremost originalist, stressing the original meaning in interpreting the Constitution. In contrast to Scalia—who had been the only other staunch originalist—he pursues a more classically liberal variety of originalism. Until 2020, Thomas was known for his silence during most oral arguments; he has since begun asking more questions to counsel. Thomas 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) 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" (arguing that Congress may not criminalize the private cultivation of medical marijuana). He is widely considered the Court's most conservative member.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia—a small, predominantly black community near Savannah founded by freedmen after the Civil War. He was the second of three children born to M. C. Thomas, a farm worker, and Leola "Pigeon" Williams, a domestic worker. They were the descendants of slaves, and the family spoke Gullah as a first language. Thomas's 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, Georgia. Thomas's father left the family when Thomas was two years old. Though Thomas's mother worked hard, she was sometimes paid only pennies per day and struggled to earn enough money to feed the family, and she was sometimes forced to rely on charity. After a house fire left them homeless, Thomas and his younger brother Myers were taken to live in Savannah with his maternal grandparents, Myers and Christine ("née" Hargrove) Anderson.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas then experienced amenities such as indoor plumbing and regular meals for the first time. Myers Anderson had little formal education but built a thriving fuel oil business that also sold ice. Thomas has called Anderson "the greatest man I have ever known." When Thomas was 10, Anderson started taking the family to help at a farm every day from sunrise to sunset. Anderson believed in hard work and self-reliance, and he counseled the children to "never let the sun catch you in bed." He also impressed upon his grandsons the importance of a good education.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Raised Catholic, Thomas attended the predominantly black St. Pius X High School for two years before transferring to St. John Vianney's Minor Seminary on the Isle of Hope, where he was among few black students. He also briefly attended Conception Seminary College, a Roman Catholic seminary in Missouri. No one in Thomas's family had attended college. Thomas has said that he left the seminary in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He had overheard another student say after the shooting, "Good, I hope the son of a bitch died", and did not think the church did enough to combat racism.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: At a nun's suggestion, Thomas enrolled at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, as a sophomore transfer student. While there, Thomas helped found the Black Student Union. He once joined a walkout of the school after some black students were punished while white students went undisciplined for the same violation. Some of the priests negotiated with the protesting black students to reenter the school. As a student, Thomas attended anti-war marches and witnessed the . He has credited these for his disillusionment with leftist movements and his turn toward conservatism.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Having spoken Gullah as a child, Thomas realized in college that he still sounded unpolished despite having been drilled in grammar at school, so he chose to major in English literature "to conquer the language." At Holy Cross, he was a member of Alpha Sigma Nu and the Purple Key Society. Thomas graduated from Holy Cross in 1971 with an A.B. "cum laude" in English literature.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas had a series of deferments from the military draft while at Holy Cross. Upon graduation, he was classified 1-A and received a low lottery number, indicating he might be drafted to serve in Vietnam. Thomas failed his medical exam because he had a curvature of the spine and was not drafted.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: After graduating from Holy Cross, Thomas attended Yale Law School, graduating in 1974 with a Juris Doctor degree ranked in the middle of his class. Thomas has said that the law firms he applied to after graduating from Yale did not take his J.D. seriously, assuming he obtained it because of affirmative action. According to Thomas, the law firms also "asked pointed questions, unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated." In his 2007 memoir, Thomas 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."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In 1975, when Thomas read economist Thomas Sowell"'s Race and Economics", he found an intellectual foundation for his philosophy. The book criticizes social reform by government and argues for individual action to overcome circumstances and adversity. Ayn Rand's works also influenced him, particularly "The Fountainhead", and he later required his staffers to watch the 1949 film version of the novel. Thomas acknowledges "some very strong libertarian leanings", though he does not consider himself a libertarian.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas has said novelist Richard Wright is the most influential writer in his life; Wright's books "Native Son" and "Black Boy" "capture[d] a lot of the feelings that I had inside that you learn how to repress." "Native Son" and Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" are Thomas's two favorite novels.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Spike Lee's films also appeal to Thomas, particularly "Do the Right Thing" and "Malcolm X." Thomas has said he would like to meet Lee.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: After graduation, Thomas studied for the Missouri bar at Saint Louis University School of Law. He was admitted to the Missouri bar on September 13, 1974. From 1974 to 1977, he was an assistant attorney general of Missouri under state Attorney General John Danforth, a fellow Yale alumnus. Thomas was the only African-American member of Danforth's staff. He worked first in the criminal appeals division of Danforth's office and later in the revenue and taxation division. He has said he considers assistant attorney general the best job he ever had. When Danforth was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976, Thomas left to become an attorney with Monsanto chemical company in St. Louis.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas moved to Washington, D.C., and again worked for Danforth from 1979 to 1981 as a legislative assistant handling energy issues for the Senate Commerce Committee. Thomas and Danforth had both studied to be ordained, although in different denominations. Danforth championed Thomas for the Supreme Court.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: President Ronald Reagan nominated Thomas as assistant secretary of education for the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education on May 1, 1981. Thomas's nomination was received by the Senate on May 28, 1981, and he was confirmed to the position on June 26, succeeding Cynthia Brown. Thomas was succeeded by Harry Singleton. Thomas chaired the EEOC from 1982 to 1990. Journalist Evan Thomas once opined that Thomas was "openly ambitious for higher office" during his tenure at the EEOC. As chairman, he promoted a doctrine of self-reliance and halted the usual EEOC approach of filing class action discrimination lawsuits, instead pursuing acts of individual discrimination. He also asserted in 1984 that black leaders were "watching the destruction of our race" as they "bitch, bitch, bitch" about Reagan instead of working with the Reagan administration to alleviate teenage pregnancy, unemployment and illiteracy.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: On October 30, 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, following Robert Bork's departure. This followed Thomas's initial protestations against becoming a judge. Thomas gained the support of other African Americans such as former transportation secretary William Coleman but 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".


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas's confirmation hearing was uneventful. The United States Senate confirmed him on March 6, 1990, and he received his commission the same day. He developed warm relationships during his 19 months on the federal court, including with fellow judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: When Associate 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. But after consulting his advisors, Bush nominated David Souter of the First Circuit Court of Appeals. A year later, Justice Thurgood Marshall, the only African American justice on the Court, announced his retirement, and Bush nominated Thomas to replace him. In announcing his selection on July 1, 1991, Bush called Thomas "best qualified at this time".


title: Clarence Thomas

text: U.S. presidents have traditionally submitted potential federal court nominees to the American Bar Association (ABA) for a confidential rating of their judicial temperament, competence and integrity on a three-level scale of well qualified, qualified or unqualified. Adam Liptak of "The New York Times" noted that the ABA has historically taken generally liberal positions on divisive issues, and studies suggest that candidates nominated by Democratic presidents fare better in the group's ratings than those nominated by Republicans. Anticipating that the ABA would rate Thomas more poorly than they thought he deserved, the White House and Republican senators pressured the ABA for at least the mid-level qualified rating and simultaneously attempted to discredit the ABA as partisan. The ABA did rate Thomas as qualified, although with one of the lowest levels of support for a Supreme Court nominee.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Some of the public statements of Thomas's opponents foreshadowed his confirmation hearings. Liberal interest groups and Republicans in the White House and Senate approached the nomination as a political campaign.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Attorney General Richard Thornburgh had previously warned Bush that replacing Marshall, who was widely revered as a civil rights icon, with any candidate who was not perceived to share Marshall's views would make confirmation difficult. Civil rights and feminist organizations opposed the appointment based partially on Thomas's criticism of affirmative action and suspicions that Thomas might not support "Roe v. Wade".


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas's formal confirmation hearings began on September 10, 1991. He was reticent when answering senators' questions during the process, recalling what had happened to Robert Bork when Bork expounded on his judicial philosophy during his confirmation hearings four years earlier. Thomas's earlier writings frequently reference the legal theory of natural law; during his confirmation hearings he limited himself to the statement that he regarded natural law as a "philosophical background" to the Constitution.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: On September 27, 1991, after extensive debate, the Judiciary Committee voted 13–1 to send Thomas's nomination to the full Senate without recommendation. A motion earlier in the day to give the nomination a "favorable" recommendation had failed 7–7. Hill's sexual harassment allegations against Thomas became public after the nomination had been reported out from the committee.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: At the conclusion of the committee's confirmation hearings, and while the Senate was debating whether to give final approval to Thomas's nomination, an FBI interview with Anita Hill was leaked to the press. 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 Harlan F. Stone's nomination was recommitted to the Judiciary Committee.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Hill was called before the Judiciary Committee and testified that ten years earlier Thomas had subjected her to comments of a sexual nature, which she felt constituted sexual in her words "behavior that is unbefitting an individual who will be a member of the Court." Hill's testimony included lurid details, and some senators questioned her aggressively. Hill accused Thomas of, among other things, making two sexually offensive remarks to her: he compared his own penis to that of Long Dong Silver, a black pornstar, and said he had discovered a pubic hair on his Coca-Cola can.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Throughout his testimony, Thomas defended his right to privacy. He made it clear that he was not going to put his personal life on display for public consumption, permit the committee (or anyone else) to probe his private life, or describe discussions that he may have had with others about his private life. The committee accepted his right to do so.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Hill was the only person to publicly testify that Thomas had sexually harassed her. Angela Wright, who worked under Thomas at the EEOC before he fired her, decided not to testify. She submitted a written statement alleging that Thomas had pressured her for a date and had made comments about the anatomy of women but said she did not feel his behavior was intimidating, nor did she feel sexually harassed, though she allowed that "[s]ome other women might have." 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."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In addition to Hill and Thomas, the committee heard from several other witnesses over the course of three days, October 11–13, 1991. A former colleague, Nancy Altman, who shared an office with Thomas at the Department of Education, testified that she heard virtually everything Thomas said over the course of two years, and never heard a sexist or offensive comment. Altman did not find it credible that Thomas could have engaged in the conduct Hill alleged without any of the dozens of women he worked with noticing it. Reflecting the skepticism of some committee members, Senator Alan K. Simpson asked why Hill met, dined with, and spoke by phone with Thomas on various occasions after they no longer worked together. In 2007, Thomas wrote "My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir", in which he addressed Hill's allegations and the caustic confirmation hearing.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Based on "evidence amassed by investigative journalists over... years", including new corroborative testimony, journalist Corey Robin wrote in a 2019 monograph, "it's since become clear that Thomas lied to the Judiciary Committee when he stated that he never sexually harassed Anita Hill" and that he had subjected her to sexually harassing comments. Robin concurred that Thomas's description of the accusations as a "high-tech lynching" was an authentic reaction and reflected Thomas's sincere belief about the racial dimension of the Judiciary Committee's inquiries.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: On October 15, 1991, after the testimony, the Senate voted to confirm Thomas as an associate justice of the Supreme Court by a 52–48 vote. In all, Thomas received the votes of 41 Republicans and 11 Democrats, while 46 Democrats and two Republicans voted to reject his nomination.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: 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 of 108 days; the vote was the narrowest margin for approval since 1881, when Stanley Matthews was confirmed 24–23.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: 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.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas is associated with the Court's conservative wing. He has rarely given media interviews during his time on the Court. In 2007, he said, "One of the reasons I don't do media interviews is, in the past, the media often has its own script." That same year, Thomas received a $1.5 million advance for his memoir, "My Grandfather's Son", which became a bestseller. He was the subject of the 2020 documentary film "Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in his Own Words".


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Political science scholar Corey Robin and Thomas biographer Scott Douglas Gerber have opined that critics such as Jeffrey Toobin have been unusually vitriolic toward Thomas. Robin has compared the way "Thomas has been dismissed as an intellectual nonentity" to similar insinuations made about Thurgood Marshall, "the only other black Supreme Court justice in American history." Gerber likewise writes,


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Other critics have outlined separate reasons, such as liberals' disappointment that Thomas has departed so much from Marshall's jurisprudence. Additional causes for the harsh criticism may be the explosive nature of sexual misconduct allegations, the suspicion among some people that Thomas was not forthright during his confirmation hearings, and the belief that, ironically, Thomas's nomination was a kind of affirmative action akin to the programs that he has criticized as a judge.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In 2006, Thomas had a 48% favorable, 36% unfavorable rating, according to Rasmussen Reports. A YouGov poll conducted in March 2021 found that Thomas was the most popular sitting Supreme Court justice among Republicans, with a 59% approval rating in that category.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: 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 among 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"; Thomas also was the most senior associate justice by this time.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas is the spouse of Ginni Thomas, a political activist who in late 2020 described an unknown number of American citizens who she hoped would be "living in barges off GITMO" in accordance with the QAnon-affiliated conspiracy theory that President Biden, his family, and thousands of state and county election officials, administrators, and volunteers orchestrated a vast conspiracy to rig the 2020 elections across thousands of administrative districts or wards. Public perception of the likelihood of such QAnon-style conspiracy theories influencing a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court was widespread enough that President Joe Biden was asked whether Thomas should recuse himself from any January-6-related cases. He replied that the answer was for others to determine, mentioning the congressional investigating committee and the Department of Justice. Under U.S. law to date, each justice of the court is the main and possibly only person who has power over their own recusal.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: A petition to impeach Thomas, hosted on MoveOn, had gathered more than 1,245,000 signatures by July 29, 2022, after the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack requested that Ginni Thomas testify about her reported connections to Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas is often described as an originalist and as a textualist. He is often described as the Court's most conservative member, though others gave Justice Antonin Scalia that designation while they served on the Court together. Scalia and Thomas had similar judicial philosophies, and pundits speculate about the degree to which Scalia found some of Thomas's views implausible.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas's jurisprudence has been compared to that of Justice Hugo Black, who "resisted the tendency to create social policy out of 'whole cloth.'" According to the same critic, Thomas generally declines to engage in judicial lawmaking, viewing the Court's constitutional role as the interpretation of law, rather than making law.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Some critics downplay the significance of originalism in Thomas's jurisprudence and say Thomas applies originalism in his decisions inconsistently. Law professor Jim Ryan and former litigator Doug Kendall have argued that Thomas "will use originalism where it provides support for a politically conservative result" but ignores originalism when "history provides no support" for a conservative ruling. Others have argued that Thomas employs a "pluralistic approach to originalism" in which he relies on a mix of original intent, understanding, and public meaning to guide his judgments. Such critics observe that Thomas's originalism most often seems inconsistent or pluralistic when court decisions intersect issues related to race. Robin, while calling originalism "at best episodic" in Thomas's rulings, says it still plays a significant role in how Thomas envisions the Constitution and "functions as an organizing" narrative for his interpretation.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In his early years on the Court, Thomas voted most frequently with Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist. On average, from 1994 to 2004, Scalia and Thomas had an 87% voting alignment, the highest on the court, followed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter's (86%). Scalia's and Thomas's agreement rate peaked in 1996, at 98%. By 2004, other pairs of justices were more closely aligned than Scalia and Thomas.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: The conventional wisdom that Thomas's votes followed Scalia's is reflected by Linda Greenhouse's observation that Thomas voted with Scalia 91% of the time during October Term 2006, and with Justice John Paul Stevens the least, 36% of the time. Jan Crawford asserts that to some extent, this was also true in the other direction: Scalia often joined Thomas instead of Thomas joining Scalia. Statistics compiled annually by Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog demonstrate that Greenhouse's count is methodology-specific, counting non-unanimous cases where Scalia and Thomas voted for the same litigant, regardless of whether they got there by the same reasoning. Goldstein's statistics show that the two agreed in full only 74% of the time and that the frequency of their agreement is not as outstanding as often implied in pieces aimed at lay audiences. For example, in that same term, Souter and Ginsburg voted together 81% of the time by the method of counting that yields a 74% agreement between Thomas and Scalia. By the metric that produces the 91% Scalia/Thomas figure, Ginsburg and Breyer agreed 90% of the time. Roberts and Alito agreed 94% of the time. Robin has called the idea that Thomas followed Scalia's votes a debunked myth.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Crawford wrote in her book on the Supreme Court that Thomas's forceful views moved "moderates like Sandra Day O'Connor further to the left" but frequently attracted votes from Rehnquist and Scalia. Toobin and Mark Tushnet opine that Rehnquist rarely assigned important majority opinions to Thomas because Thomas's views made it difficult for him to persuade a majority to join him.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: From when he joined the Court in 1991 through the end of the 2019 term, Thomas had written 693 opinions, not including opinions relating to orders or the "shadow docket". These 693 opinions consist of 223 majority opinions, 226 concurrences, 214 dissents, and 30 "split" opinions. Thomas has written the majority opinion in a 5–4 case 40 times and the dissenting opinion in an 8–1 case 30 times.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: From 1994 to 2004, on average, Thomas was the third-most-frequent dissenter on the Court, behind Stevens and Scalia. Four other justices dissented as frequently in 2007; this number was three in 2006 and one in 2005.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas spoke favorably about "stare decisis"—the principle that the Court is bound by its preceding decisions—during his confirmation hearings, saying, ""stare decisis" provides continuity to our system, it provides predictability, and in our process of case-by-case decision making, I think it is a very important and critical concept." According to Scalia, Thomas "doesn't believe in "stare decisis", period." This assessment is consistent with Thomas's record on the bench: factoring in length of tenure, Thomas urged overruling and joined in overruling precedents more often than any other justice on the Rehnquist Court.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Also according to Scalia, Thomas is more willing to overrule constitutional cases than he was: "If a constitutional line of authority is wrong, he would say let's get it right. I wouldn't do that." Law professor Michael Gerhardt has said that Scalia's characterization of Thomas may be incorrect, given that Thomas has supported leaving a broad spectrum of constitutional decisions intact. Thomas's belief in originalism is strong; he has said, "When faced with a clash of constitutional principle and a line of unreasoned cases wholly divorced from the text, history, and structure of our founding document, we should not hesitate to resolve the tension in favor of the Constitution's original meaning." Thomas believes that an erroneous decision can and should be overturned, no matter how old it is.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In 2005, while assistant professor of law at Notre Dame Law School, Amy Coney Barrett wrote that Thomas supports statutory "stare decisis". Her examples included his concurring opinion in "Fogerty v. Fantasy".


title: Clarence Thomas

text: 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. He wrote 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 "Franchise Tax Bd. of Cal.", 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.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Flowers v. Mississippi" (2019), a 7–2 decision, Thomas dissented from the ruling overturning Mississippi resident Curtis Flowers’s death sentence, joined only by Neil Gorsuch, and suggested "Batson v. Kentucky", which forbids prosecutors from using race as a factor in making peremptory challenges in jury selection, was wrongly decided and should be overruled. Gorsuch did not join the section of Thomas's opinion suggesting "Batson" should be overruled.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas has consistently supported narrowing the court's interpretation of the Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause (often simply called the "Commerce Clause") to limit federal power, though he has broadly interpreted states' sovereign immunity from lawsuits under the clause.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "United States v. Lopez" and "United States v. Morrison", the Court held that Congress lacked power under the Commerce Clause to regulate non-commercial activities. In these cases, Thomas wrote a separate concurring opinion arguing for his interpretation of the Commerce Clause's original meaning. Subsequently, in "Gonzales v. Raich", the Court interpreted the Commerce Clause combined with the Necessary and Proper Clause as empowering the federal government to arrest, prosecute, and imprison patients who used marijuana grown at home for medicinal purposes, even where that is legal under state law. Thomas dissented in "Raich", again arguing for the Commerce Clause's original meaning.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas and Scalia rejected the notion of a Dormant Commerce Clause, also known as the "Negative Commerce Clause". That doctrine bars state commercial regulation even if Congress has not yet acted on the matter.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Lopez," Thomas expressed his view that federal regulation of manufacturing and agriculture is unconstitutional; he sees both as outside the Commerce Clause's scope. He believes federal legislators have overextended the clause, while some of his critics argue that his position on congressional authority would invalidate much of the federal government's contemporary work. According to Thomas, it is not the Court's job to update the Constitution. Proponents of broad national power such as Professor Michael Dorf deny that they are trying to do so; instead, they say they are merely addressing a set of economic facts that did not exist when the Constitution was framed.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas has argued that the executive branch has broad authority under the Constitution and federal statutes. In "Hamdi v. Rumsfeld," he was the only justice to agree with the Fourth Circuit that Congress had the power to authorize the president's detention of U.S. citizens who are enemy combatants. Thomas granted the federal government the "strongest presumptions" and said "due process requires nothing more than a good-faith executive determination" to justify the imprisonment of a U.S. citizen.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas was one of three justices to dissent in "Hamdan v. Rumsfeld", which held that the military commissions the Bush administration created to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay required explicit congressional authorization and that the commissions conflicted with both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and "at least" Common Article Three of the Geneva Convention. Thomas argued that Hamdan was an illegal combatant and therefore not protected by the Geneva Convention and agreed with Scalia that the Court was "patently erroneous" in its declaration of jurisdiction in this case.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In the Ninth Circuit case "East Bay Sanctuary Covenant v. Trump" (2018), which placed an injunction on the Trump administration's asylum policy, Thomas dissented from a denial of stay application. The Ninth Circuit imposed an injunction on the Trump administration's policy granting asylum only to refugees entering from a designated port of entry, ruling that it violated the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Ninth Circuit Judge Jay Bybee’s majority opinion concluded that denial of the ability to apply for asylum regardless of entry point is "the hollowest of rights that an alien must be allowed to apply for asylum regardless of whether she arrived through a port of entry if another rule makes her categorically ineligible for asylum based on precisely that fact." Gorsuch, Alito, Kavanaugh also dissented in the decision to deny a stay to the Ninth Circuit's injunction.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Federalism was a central part of the Rehnquist Court's constitutional agenda. Thomas consistently voted for outcomes that promoted state-governmental authority in cases involving federalism-based limits on Congress's enumerated powers. According to law professor Ann Althouse, the court has yet to move toward "the broader, more principled version of federalism propounded by Justice Thomas."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Foucha v. Louisiana", Thomas dissented from the majority opinion that required the removal from a mental institution of a prisoner who had become sane. The court held that a Louisiana statute violated the Due Process Clause "because it allows an insanity acquittee to be committed to a mental institution until he is able to demonstrate that he is not dangerous to himself and others, even though he does not suffer from any mental illness." Dissenting, Thomas cast the issue as a matter of federalism. "Removing sane insanity acquittees from mental institutions may make eminent sense as a policy matter", he wrote, "but the Due Process Clause does not require the States to conform to the policy preferences of federal judges." In "United States v. Comstock", Thomas's dissent argued for the release of a former federal prisoner from civil commitment, again on the basis of federalism. In "U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton", he wrote a dissent defending term limits on federal House and Senate candidates as a valid exercise of state legislative power.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: As of 2007, Thomas was the justice most willing to exercise judicial review of federal statutes but among the least likely to overturn state statutes. According to a "New York Times" editorial, "from 1994 to 2005 ... Justice Thomas voted to overturn federal laws in 34 cases and Justice Scalia in 31, compared with just 15 for Justice Stephen Breyer."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder", Thomas was the sole dissenter, voting to throw out Section Five of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Section Five requires states with a history of racial voter discrimination—mostly states from the old South—to gain Justice Department clearance when revising election procedures. Congress had reauthorized Section Five in 2006 for another 25 years, but Thomas said the law was no longer necessary, stating that the rate of black voting in seven Section Five states was higher than the national average. He wrote, "the violence, intimidation and subterfuge that led Congress to pass Section 5 and this court to uphold it no longer remains." He took this position again in "Shelby County v. Holder", voting with the majority and concurring with the reasoning that struck down Section Five.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: By 2002, Thomas was the justice second-most likely to uphold free speech claims (tied with Souter). He has voted in favor of First Amendment claims in cases involving issues including pornography, campaign contributions, political leafleting, religious speech, and commercial speech.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: With respect to the Establishment Clause, Thomas espouses accommodationism. He has made public his belief that all limits on federal campaign contributions are unconstitutional and should be struck down. He voted with the majority in "Citizens United v. FEC".


title: Clarence Thomas

text: On occasion, Thomas has disagreed with free speech claimants. For example, he dissented in "Virginia v. Black", a case that struck down part of a Virginia statute that banned cross burning. Concurring in "Morse v. Frederick", he argued that the free speech rights of students in public schools are limited. In "Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L."—in which an off-campus high school student was punished by her school for sending a profane message on social media regarding her school, softball team, and cheer team—Thomas was the lone dissenter, siding with the school. He criticized the majority for relying on "vague considerations" and wrote that historically schools could discipline students in situations similar to the case. In "Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans", he joined the majority opinion that Texas's decision to deny a request for a Confederate Battle Flag specialty license plate was constitutional.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas wrote the decision in "Ashcroft v. ACLU", which held that the Child Online Protection Act might be constitutional. The government was enjoined from enforcing it, pending further proceedings in the lower courts. Thomas wrote concurrences in "McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission", 514 U.S. 334 (1995) and "United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group" (2000).


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow," Thomas wrote, "It may well be the case that anything that would violate the incorporated Establishment Clause would actually violate the Free Exercise Clause, further calling into doubt the utility of incorporating the Establishment Clause", and in "Cutter v. Wilkinson", he wrote, "I note, however, that a state law that would violate the incorporated Establishment Clause might also violate the Free Exercise Clause."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas has said "it makes little sense to incorporate the Establishment Clause" "vis-à-vis" the states by the Fourteenth Amendment.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas agreed with the judgment in "McDonald v. Chicago" (2010) that the right to keep and bear arms is applicable to state and local governments, but he wrote a separate concurrence finding that an individual's right to bear arms is fundamental as a privilege of American citizenship under the Privileges or Immunities Clause rather than as a fundamental right under the due process clause. The four justices in the plurality opinion specifically rejected incorporation under the privileges or immunities clause, "declin[ing] to disturb" the holding in the "Slaughter-House Cases", which, according to the plurality, had held that the clause applied only to federal matters.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Since 2010, Thomas has dissented from denial of certiorari in several Second Amendment cases. He voted to grant certiorari in "Friedman v. City of Highland Park" (2015), which upheld bans on certain semi-automatic rifles; "Jackson v. San Francisco" (2014), which upheld trigger lock ordinances similar to those struck down in "Heller"; "Peruta v. San Diego County" (2016), which upheld restrictive concealed carry licensing in California; and "Silvester v. Becerra" (2017), which upheld waiting periods for firearm purchasers who have already passed background checks and already own firearms. He was joined by Scalia in the first two cases, and by Gorsuch in "Peruta".


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas dissented from the denial of an application for a stay presented to Chief Justice Roberts in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit case "Guedes v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" (2019), a case challenging the Trump administration's ban on bump stocks. Only Thomas and Gorsuch publicly dissented.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas authored the majority opinion in "New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen" (2022), guaranteeing the right of law-abiding citizens to carry firearms in public.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In cases regarding the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, Thomas often favors police over defendants. For example, his opinion for the Court in "Board of Education v. Earls" upheld drug testing for students involved in extracurricular activities, and he wrote again for the Court in "Samson v. California", permitting random searches on parolees. He dissented in "Georgia v. Randolph", which prohibited warrantless searches that one resident approves and the other opposes, arguing that the Court's decision in "Coolidge v. New Hampshire" controlled the case. In "Indianapolis v. Edmond", Thomas described the Court's extant case law as having held that "suspicionless roadblock seizures are constitutionally permissible if conducted according to a plan that limits the discretion of the officers conducting the stops." He expressed doubt that those cases were decided correctly but concluded that since the litigants in the case at bar had not briefed or argued that the earlier cases be overruled, he believed that the Court should assume their validity and rule accordingly. Thomas was in the majority in "Kyllo v. United States", which held that the use of thermal imaging technology to probe a suspect's home without a warrant violated the Fourth Amendment.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In cases involving schools, Thomas has advocated greater respect for the doctrine of "in loco parentis", which he defines as "parents delegat[ing] to teachers their authority to discipline and maintain order." His dissent in "Safford Unified School District v. Redding" illustrates his application of this postulate in the Fourth Amendment context. School officials in the "Safford" case had a reasonable suspicion that 13-year-old Savana Redding was illegally distributing prescription-only drugs. All the justices concurred that it was therefore reasonable for the school officials to search Redding, and the main issue before the Court was only whether the search went too far by becoming a strip search or the like. All the justices except Thomas concluded that the search violated the Fourth Amendment. The majority required a finding of danger or reason to believe drugs were hidden in a student's underwear in order to justify a strip search. Thomas wrote, "It is a mistake for judges to assume the responsibility for deciding which school rules are important enough to allow for invasive searches and which rules are not" and "reasonable suspicion that Redding was in possession of drugs in violation of these policies, therefore, justified a search extending to any area where small pills could be concealed." He added, "[t]here can be no doubt that a parent would have had the authority to conduct the search."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Doggett v. United States", the defendant had technically been a fugitive from the time he was indicted in 1980 until his arrest in 1988. The Court held that the delay between indictment and arrest violated Doggett's Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial, finding that the government had been negligent in pursuing him and that he was unaware of the indictment. Thomas dissented, arguing that the Speedy Trial Clause's purpose was to prevent "'undue and oppressive incarceration' and the 'anxiety and concern accompanying public accusation'" and that the case implicated neither. He cast the case instead as "present[ing] the question [of] whether, independent of these core concerns, the Speedy Trial Clause protects an accused from two additional harms: (1) prejudice to his ability to defend himself caused by the passage of time; and (2) disruption of his life years after the alleged commission of his crime." Thomas dissented from the court's decision to, as he saw it, answer the former in the affirmative. He wrote that dismissing the conviction "invites the Nation's judges to indulge in ad hoc and result-driven second guessing of the government's investigatory efforts. Our Constitution neither contemplates nor tolerates such a role."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Garza v. Idaho", Thomas and Gorsuch, in dissent, suggested that "Gideon v. Wainwright" (1963), which required that indigent criminal defendants be provided counsel, was wrongly decided and should be overruled.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas was among the dissenters in "Atkins v. Virginia" and "Roper v. Simmons", which held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the application of the death penalty to certain classes of persons. In "Kansas v. Marsh", his opinion for the Court indicated a belief that the Constitution affords states broad procedural latitude in imposing the death penalty, provided they remain within the limits of "Furman v. Georgia" and "Gregg v. Georgia", the 1976 case in which the Court reversed its 1972 ban on death sentences if states followed procedural guidelines.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Hudson v. McMillian", a prisoner had been beaten, sustaining a cracked lip, broken dental plate, loosened teeth, cuts, and bruises. Although these were not "serious injuries", the Court believed, it held that "the use of excessive physical force against a prisoner may constitute cruel and unusual punishment even though the inmate does not suffer serious injury." Dissenting, Thomas wrote, "a use of force that causes only insignificant harm to a prisoner may be immoral, it may be tortious, it may be criminal, and it may even be remediable under other provisions of the Federal Constitution, but it is not 'cruel and unusual punishment'. In concluding to the contrary, the Court today goes far beyond our precedents." Thomas's vote—in one of his first cases after joining the Court—was an early example of his willingness to be the sole dissenter (Scalia later joined the opinion). His opinion was criticized by the seven-member majority, which wrote that, by comparing physical assault to other prison conditions such as poor prison food, it ignored "the concepts of dignity, civilized standards, humanity, and decency that animate the Eighth Amendment". According to historian David Garrow, Thomas's dissent in "Hudson" was a "classic call for federal judicial restraint, reminiscent of views that were held by Felix Frankfurter and John M. Harlan II a generation earlier, but editorial criticism rained down on him". Thomas later responded to the accusation "that I supported the beating of prisoners in that case. Well, one must either be illiterate or fraught with malice to reach that conclusion ... no honest reading can reach such a conclusion."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "United States v. Bajakajian", Thomas joined with the Court's liberal justices to write the majority opinion declaring a fine unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. The fine was for failing to declare more than $300,000 in a suitcase on an international flight. Under a federal statute, (a)(1), the passenger would have had to forfeit the entire amount. Thomas noted that the case required a distinction to be made between civil forfeiture and a fine exacted with the intention of punishing the respondent. He found that the forfeiture in this case was clearly intended as a punishment at least in part, was "grossly disproportional" and violated the Excessive Fines Clause.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas has written that the "Cruel and Unusual Punishment" clause "contains no proportionality principle", meaning that the question whether a sentence should be rejected as "cruel and unusual" depends only on the sentence itself, not on what crime is being punished. He was concurring with the Court's decision to reject a request for review from a petitioner who had been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison under California's "Three-Strikes" law for stealing some golf clubs because the combined value of the clubs made the theft a felony and he had two previous felonies in his criminal record.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas believes the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids consideration of race, such as race-based affirmative action or preferential treatment. In "Adarand Constructors v. Peña", for example, he wrote, "there is a 'moral [and] constitutional equivalence' between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality. Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Gratz v. Bollinger", Thomas wrote, "a State's use of racial discrimination in higher education admissions is categorically prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause." In "Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1", Thomas joined the opinion of Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote that "[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Concurring, Thomas wrote, "if our history has taught us anything, it has taught us to beware of elites bearing racial theories", and charged that the dissent carried "similarities" to the arguments of the segregationist litigants in "Brown v. Board of Education".


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Likewise, in "Grutter v. Bollinger", Thomas approvingly quoted Justice Harlan's "Plessy v. Ferguson" dissent: "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." In a concurrence in "Missouri v. Jenkins" (1995), he wrote that the Missouri District Court "has read our cases to support the theory that black students suffer an unspecified psychological harm from segregation that retards their mental and educational development. This approach not only relies upon questionable social science research rather than constitutional principle, but it also rests on an assumption of black inferiority."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Some legal scholars have called Thomas's views on race and the constitution "idiosyncratic," "pessimistic," or "fatalistic." For example, professors Corey Robin and Stephen F. Smith have characterized Thomas's philosophy as grounded in a form of black nationalism that sees governmental attempts to address racism as either futile or counterproductive. That view contrasts with the belief that laws should be race-neutral because racial discrimination is no longer a serious problem in the United States.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas has contended that the Constitution does not address abortion. In "Planned Parenthood v. Casey" (1992), the Court reaffirmed "Roe v. Wade". Thomas and Justice Byron White joined the dissenting opinions of Rehnquist and Scalia. Rehnquist wrote, "[w]e believe "Roe" was wrongly decided, and that it can and should be overruled consistently with our traditional approach to "stare decisis" in constitutional cases." Scalia's opinion concluded that the right to obtain an abortion is not "a liberty protected by the Constitution of the United States." "[T]he Constitution says absolutely nothing about it," Scalia wrote, "and [ ] the longstanding traditions of American society have permitted it to be legally proscribed."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Stenberg v. Carhart" (2000), the Court struck down a state ban on partial-birth abortion, concluding that it failed "Casey"'s "undue burden" test. Thomas dissented, writing, "Although a State "may" permit abortion, nothing in the Constitution dictates that a State "must" do so." He went on to criticize the reasoning of the "Casey" and "Stenberg" majorities: "The majority's insistence on a health exception is a fig leaf barely covering its hostility to any abortion regulation by the States—a hostility that "Casey" purported to reject."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Gonzales v. Carhart" (2007), the Court rejected a facial challenge to a federal ban on partial-birth abortion. Concurring, Thomas asserted that the court's abortion jurisprudence had no basis in the Constitution but that the court had accurately applied that jurisprudence in rejecting the challenge. He added that the Court was not deciding the question of whether Congress had the power to outlaw partial-birth abortions: "[W]hether the Act constitutes a permissible exercise of Congress's power under the Commerce Clause is not before the Court [in this case] ... the parties did not raise or brief that issue; it is outside the question presented; and the lower courts did not address it."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In December 2018, Thomas dissented when the Court voted not to hear cases brought by Louisiana and Kansas to deny Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. Alito and Gorsuch joined Thomas's dissent, arguing that the Court was "abdicating its judicial duty."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In February 2019, Thomas joined three of the Court's other conservative justices in voting to reject a stay to temporarily block a law restricting abortion in Louisiana. The law that the court temporarily stayed, in a 5–4 decision, would have required that doctors performing abortions have admitting privileges in a hospital.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc." (2019), a per curiam decision upholding the provision of Indiana's abortion restriction regarding fetal remains disposal on rational basis scrutiny and upholding the lower court rulings striking down the provision banning race, sex, and disability, Thomas wrote a concurring opinion comparing abortion and birth control to eugenics, which was practiced in the U.S. in the early 20th century and by the Nazi government in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, and comparing "Box" to "Buck v. Bell" (1927), which upheld a forced sterilization law regarding people with mental disabilities. In his opinion, Thomas quoted Margaret Sanger's support for contraception as a form of personal reproductive control that she considered superior to "the horrors of abortion and infanticide" (Sanger's words). His opinion referred several times to historian/journalist Adam Cohen's book "Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck"; shortly afterward, Cohen published a sharply worded criticism saying that Thomas had misinterpreted his book and misunderstood the history of the eugenics movement. In "Box", only Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ginsburg publicly registered their votes. Ginsburg and Sotomayor concurred in part and dissented in part, stating they would have upheld the lower court decision on striking down the race, sex, and disability ban as well as the lower court decision striking down the fetal remains disposal provision.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In a concurring opinion in "Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization" (2022), Thomas wrote that "any substantive due process decision is 'demonstrably erroneous'", and argued that the Supreme Court should go beyond "Roe vs. Wade" and reconsider other substantive due process precedents, including those established in "Griswold v. Connecticut" (1965), "Lawrence v. Texas" (2003) and "Obergefell v. Hodges" (2015). The overturning of these previous decisions would enable states to limit access to contraception, criminalize sodomy, and criminalize same-sex marriage, respectively.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Jacobson v. United States" (1992), Thomas agreed with the majority that the federal government had unlawfully entrapped a gay man when it enticed him into buying a magazine with nude pictures of underage boys.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Romer v. Evans" (1996), Thomas joined Scalia's dissenting opinion arguing that Amendment Two to the Colorado State Constitution did not violate the Equal Protection Clause. The Colorado amendment forbade any judicial, legislative, or executive action designed to protect persons from discrimination based on "homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Lawrence v. Texas" (2003), Thomas issued a one-page dissent in which he called the Texas statute prohibiting sodomy "uncommonly silly", a phrase originally used by Justice Potter Stewart. He then said that if he were a member of the Texas legislature he would vote to repeal the law, as it was not a worthwhile use of "law enforcement resources" to police private sexual behavior. But Thomas opined that the Constitution does not contain a right to privacy and therefore did not vote to strike the statute down. He saw the issue as a matter for states to decide for themselves.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In "Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia" (2020), Thomas joined Alito and Kavanaugh in dissenting from the decision that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. (Thomas and Alito wrote a dissent together, and Kavanaugh wrote separately.) The 6–3 ruling's majority consisted of two Republican-appointed justices, Roberts and Gorsuch, along with four Democratic-appointed justices: Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In October 2020, Thomas joined the other justices in denying an appeal from Kim Davis, a county clerk who refused to give marriage licenses to same-sex couples, but wrote a separate opinion reiterating his dissent from "Obergefell v. Hodges" and expressing his belief that it was wrongly decided. In July 2021, he was one of three justices, with Gorsuch and Alito, who voted to hear an appeal from a Washington florist who had refused service to a same-sex couple based on her religious beliefs against same-sex marriage. In November 2021, Thomas dissented from the majority of justices in a 6-3 vote to reject an appeal from Mercy San Juan Medical Center, a hospital affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church, which had sought to deny a hysterectomy to a transgender patient on religious grounds. Alito and Gorsuch also dissented, and the vote to reject the appeal left in place a lower court ruling in the patient's favor.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas is well known for his reticence during oral argument. After asking a question during a death penalty case on February 22, 2006, Thomas did not ask another question from the bench for more than ten years, until February 29, 2016, about a response to a question regarding whether persons convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence should be barred permanently from firearm possession. This moment has been seen as an homage to Justice Scalia, who had died a few weeks earlier. Thomas also had a nearly seven-year streak of not speaking at all during oral arguments, finally breaking that silence on January 14, 2013, when he, a Yale Law graduate, was understood to have joked either that a law degree from Yale or from Harvard may be proof of incompetence. Thomas took a more active role in questioning when the Supreme Court shifted to holding teleconferenced arguments in May 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic; before that, he spoke in 32 of the roughly 2,400 arguments since 1991.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas has given many reasons for his silence, including self-consciousness about how he speaks, a preference for listening to those arguing the case, and difficulty getting in a word. His speaking and listening habits may have been influenced by his Gullah upbringing, during which his English was relatively unpolished.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In 2000, Thomas told a group of high school students, "if you wait long enough, someone will ask your question." Although he rarely speaks from the bench, he has acknowledged that sometimes during oral arguments, he will pass notes to Breyer who then asks questions on Thomas's behalf.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In November 2007, Thomas told an audience at Hillsdale College, "My colleagues should shut up!" He later explained, "I don't think that for judging, and for what we are doing, all those questions are necessary." According to Amber Porter of ABC News, one of the most notable instances in which Thomas asked a question was in 2002 during oral arguments for "Virginia v. Black", when he expressed concern to Michael Dreeben, who had been speaking on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice, that he was "actually understating the symbolism ... and the effect of ... the burning cross" and its use as a symbol of the "reign of terror" of "100 years of lynching and activity in the South by the Knights of Camellia ... and the Ku Klux Klan".


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Thomas is not the first quiet justice. In the 1970s and 1980s, Justices William J. Brennan, Marshall, and Harry Blackmun generally were quiet. But Thomas's silence stood out in the 1990s as the other eight justices engaged in active questioning. "The New York Times"'s Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak has called it a "pity" that Thomas does not ask questions, saying that he has a "distinctive legal philosophy and a background entirely different from that of any other justice" and that those he asked in the 2001 and 2002 terms were "mostly good questions, brisk and pointed." Conversely, Jeffrey Toobin, writing in "The New Yorker", called Thomas's silence "disgraceful" behavior that had "gone from curious to bizarre to downright embarrassing, for himself and for the institution he represents."


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In a 2017 paper in the "Northwestern University Law Review", RonNell Andersen Jones and Aaron L. Nielson argue that while asking few questions, "in many ways, [Thomas] is a model questioner", exhibiting habits such as following up on colleagues' inquiries and showing respect to attorneys. Later in 2020, Jones and Nielson posited that Thomas asked questions more frequently when the Supreme Court held oral arguments by teleconferencing during the COVID-19 pandemic because he found the new format more palatable. In the teleconferencing format, justices took turns answering questions and spoke when called on by Chief Justice Roberts. Thomas "has questions that he thinks are valuable", Jones and Nielson concluded, but dislikes the "free-for-all" of typical questioning during oral arguments.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In 1971, Thomas married Kathy Grace Ambush. The couple had one child, Jamal Adeen (b. 1973, New Haven, Connecticut), Thomas's sole offspring. Thomas and his first wife separated in 1981 and divorced in 1984. In 1987, Thomas married Virginia Lamp, a lobbyist and aide to Republican Congressman Dick Armey. In 1997, they took in Thomas's six-year-old great-nephew, Mark Martin Jr., who had lived with his mother in Savannah public housing. Since 1999, Thomas and his wife have traveled across the U.S. in a motorcoach between Court terms.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Virginia "Ginni" Thomas has remained active in conservative politics, serving as a consultant to The Heritage Foundation and as founder and president of Liberty Central. In 2011, she stepped down from Liberty Central to open a conservative lobbying firm, touting her "experience and connections", meeting with newly elected Republican representatives and calling herself an "ambassador to the Tea Party". Also in 2011, 74 Democratic members of the House of Representatives wrote that Justice Thomas should recuse himself on cases regarding the Affordable Care Act because of "appearance of a conflict of interest" based on his wife's work.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In January 2011, the liberal advocacy group Common Cause reported that between 2003 and 2007, Thomas failed to disclose $686,589 in income his wife earned from The Heritage Foundation, instead reporting "none" where "spousal noninvestment income" would be reported on his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms. The next week, Thomas said the disclosure of his wife's income had been "inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions". He amended reports going back to 1989.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: "The Washington Post" reported in February 2021 that Ginni Thomas apologized to a group of Thomas's former clerks on the email listserv "Thomas Clerk World" for her role in contributing to a rift relating to "pro-Trump postings and former Thomas clerk John Eastman, who spoke at the rally and represented Trump in some of his failed lawsuits filed to overturn the election results." In March 2022, texts between Ginni Thomas and Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows from 2020 were turned over to the Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. The texts show Ginni Thomas repeatedly urging Meadows to overturn the election results and repeating conspiracy theories about ballot fraud. In response, 24 Democratic members of the House of Representatives and the Senate demanded that Thomas recuse himself from cases related to efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the January 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol on the grounds that Ginni Thomas's involvement in such efforts raises questions about his impartiality. An April 2022 Quinnipiac poll found that 52% of Americans agree that in light of Ginni Thomas's texts about overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election, Thomas should recuse himself from related cases.


title: Clarence Thomas

text: Clarence Thomas was reconciled to the Catholic Church in the mid-1990s. In his autobiography, he criticized the church for failing to grapple with racism in the 1960s during the civil rights movement, saying it was not so "adamant about ending racism then as it is about ending abortion now". As of 2021, Thomas is one of 14 practicing Catholic justices in the Court's history and one of six currently serving (along with Alito, Kavanaugh, Roberts, Sotomayor and Barrett).


title: Clarence Thomas

text: In 2016, Moira Smith, a lawyer, said that Thomas groped her at a dinner party in 1999, when she was a Truman Foundation scholar. Thomas called the allegation "preposterous".


title: Emily Ratajkowski

text: Emily O'Hara Ratajkowski (, ; born June 7, 1991) is an American model, actress, author and podcaster. Born in London to American parents and raised in Encinitas, California, Ratajkowski began acting as a child before she gained a recurring role on the Nickelodeon series "iCarly" (2009–2010). Her modeling debut was on the cover of the March 2012 issue of the erotic magazine "treats!", which led to her appearing in two music videos: Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" and Maroon 5's "Love Somebody".


title: Emily Ratajkowski

text: Ratajkowski's feature film debut was as the mistress of Ben Affleck's character in the film "Gone Girl" (2014). Her other roles include the films "Entourage" (2015), "We Are Your Friends" (2015), "I Feel Pretty" (2018) and "Welcome Home" (2018), as well as the miniseries "The Spoils Before Dying" (2015) and the anthology series "Easy" (2016). She appeared in the 2014 and 2015 "Sports Illustrated" swimsuit issues, and made her professional catwalk modeling debut for Marc Jacobs at New York Fashion Week in 2015. She has since walked on the Paris Fashion Week runway for Miu Miu and Milan Fashion Week for Bottega Veneta, Dolce & Gabbana, and Versace.


title: Emily Ratajkowski

text: Ratajkowski appeared in a Buick Super Bowl commercial during Super Bowl 50 (2016), and has become the spokesperson for brands such as DKNY, The Frye Company, Kerastase, Paco Rabanne, and DL1961. She is an advocate for women's health issues as a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood. As a self-identified feminist, Ratajkowski has received both support and criticism for her views on sexual expression. Her essay collection, "My Body", was published by Metropolitan Books in November 2021.


title: Emily Ratajkowski

text: Emily O'Hara Ratajkowski was born June 7, 1991 in Westminster, London, the only child of American parents, school teachers Kathleen Anne Balgley and John David "J.D." Ratajkowski. She was raised in Encinitas near San Diego, California. She attended UCLA for a year before dropping out to model full-time. Her father was raised Roman Catholic, whereas her mother is Jewish. Ratajkowski has stated that she ethnically identifies herself as "Polish-Israeli." She also has English, Irish, and German ancestry.


title: Emily Ratajkowski

text: Ratajkowski tried soccer, acting, and ballet before modeling. She participated in a few local theater productions as a child and young teen. Exposure to the nude female figure in photography and art during her formative years, including the work of her father and the photography of Helmut Newton and Herb Ritts, prepared Ratajkowski for nude work. She has said, "We have this culture of men, especially, watching pornography, but then offended by a classic nude portrait or photograph, and I've never felt that way." She was also influenced by third-wave feminism and works such as "The Beauty Myth" and "Promiscuities" by Naomi Wolf.


title: Emily Ratajkowski

text: With encouragement from an acting coach, Ratajkowski met and signed with a talent agent who contacted Ford Models. That same day, she signed with Ford at age 14 and went on to do teen print catalog modeling for Kohl's and Nordstrom. At 15, Ratajkowski began auditioning for Disney and "iCarly" roles, but she was often typecast as a bully or cheerleader and bigger roles did not materialize. She attended San Dieguito Academy, a high school in Encinitas, while modeling and acting in Los Angeles. After two nondescript movie roles, she appeared as Gibby's girlfriend, Tasha, in two episodes of the third season of Nickelodeon's "iCarly" (2009–2010). Her manager discouraged her from pursuing many acting engagements until she could be more selective.


title: Emily Ratajkowski

text: Ratajkowski attended UCLA for one year in 2009, and dropped out, deciding to model full-time. She later said that she found the fine art education at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture arbitrary and in conflict with her artistic concepts, and that she did not enjoy going to fraternities. After campaigns and editorials with photographer Tony Duran, Ratajkowski began shooting more fashion editorials and posed for several early issues of the artistic erotica magazine "treats!", including the cover of its third issue, in March 2012. She credits that cover for bringing her the two unsolicited, high-profile, music video roles. Ratajkowski later filmed commercials for Nikon and Carl's Jr., including multiple versions of a 2012 Carl's Jr. commercial with Sara Jean Underwood. She also did nude and clothed art modeling for magazines, including a May 2012 shoot with Jonathan Leder, as well as work for Frederick's of Hollywood; a 2012 holiday video and a 2011 Valentine's video in which Ratajkowski appeared for the company are among the most popular videos on the company's YouTube channel. Ratajkowski worked with photographer Tony Kelly for the March 2013 "GQ Turkey" cover.


title: Emily Ratajkowski

text: Ratajkowski appeared in Robin Thicke, T.I., and Pharrell Williams's 2013 video, "Blurred Lines". Previously, Ratajkowski had been cast in two other music videos: "Fast Car" by Taio Cruz, which was released on November 5, 2012, and Maroon 5's "Love Somebody", which was released two months after "Blurred Lines". "Love Somebody", shot on January 16, and "Blurred Lines" were both produced in 2013. The video for "Love Somebody" was released on May 21, 2013. Directed by Rich Lee, it shows bare-chested Adam Levine using inverse green screen technology to rub paint onto Ratajkowski with his hands. As they touch, they reveal each other.


title: Emily Ratajkowski

text: Thicke had seen Ratajkowski's "treats!" cover that "The New York Times" Bee Shapiro described as "an artfully composed black-and-white photograph of Ms. Ratajkowski sitting completely nude with her knees tucked to her chest" and convinced director Diane Martel to cast her in the "Blurred Lines" music video. Martel felt that "she looked smart and stunningly beautiful" in the photo. Ratajkowski initially declined the role, fearing being classified as a music video model, but Martel persuaded her. The video was released on March 20, 2013. On March 28, Thicke posted an explicit version, with a topless Ratajkowski.


title: Emily Ratajkowski

text: "Blurred Lines" was controversial: its video was called sexist for its perceived degradation of women, and some felt its lyrics promoted rape. Others disagreed, asserting that the lyrics supported female power and sexual freedom. Martel defended Ratajkowski's performance, saying: "it's very, very funny and subtly ridiculing." Ratajkowski did not think of the video as sexist and claimed that the producers, through the use of humor and sarcasm, "took something that on paper sounded really sexist and misogynistic and made it more interesting". She said that the song "gave me an opportunity to say the things that I felt about feminism today and about women in general in pop culture." Ratajkowski did not feel objectified and enjoyed performing in a sexual manner: The attention given to the nudity in the video, she said, shows that America has not advanced as far as it should have, and, she believes, society represses sexuality, which is bad for both sexes.