‘We are not mass media icons,’ says supreme court justice, the subject of a new biography and film, as he opens judicial centre in Atlanta

This article is more than 7 months old

This article is more than 7 months old

Judges must not bend rulings to their own racial, religious or partisan preferences and instead uphold the rule of law even when it leads to unpopular decisions, the US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas said on Tuesday.

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“Each time a judge sidesteps or manipulates the law to achieve his or her desired outcome, the rule of law suffers and is undermined and eventually compromised,” Thomas said in Atlanta, during the dedication of a judicial centre that will house Georgia’s supreme, appeals and business courts.

In some circles, his remarks might be met with skepticism.

Thomas is widely held to be the most resolutely conservative member of a court now controlled by a rightwing majority after two controversial appointments by Donald Trump.

In a 2014 analysis, for example, the New York Times rated the George HW Bush appointee “the member of the court most likely to disagree with its liberal wing”.

In 2016, the New Yorker said that though Thomas had a “highly idiosyncratic” view of the US constitution, he was “a great deal more conservative than his colleagues, and arguably the most conservative justice to serve on the supreme court since the 1930s”.

Last year, Thomas urged his colleagues on the court to be less devoted to upholding the principle of legal precedent. In a case involving gun possession, he wrote: “When faced with a demonstrably erroneous precedent, my rule is simple: We should not follow it.”

Analysts suggest that such an approach could lead to the overturning of such decisions as Roe v Wade, the 1973 supreme court ruling which legalized abortion and remains a key target of the conservative movement.

Thomas has also been influential in key conservative victories, including around gun controls and campaign finance. In the words of the website Oyez, a project run by Cornell University and Chicago-Kent College of Law which seeks to make the supreme court accessible to the public: “Though Thomas is known for his lack of engagement in the oral arguments, his intellect is indispensable to his conservative cohorts.”

Thomas, who was born in Pin Point, near Savannah, noted on Tuesday that it was not long since courthouses like the one being dedicated were segregated. Segregation endured not only because of prejudices and a lack of understanding, he said, but because of a “lack of courage among those who knew or should have known better, especially in the judicial branch of government”.

Having the courage to uphold the rule of law may lead judges to decisions that are not popular, Thomas said.

“Our decisions should not be driven by a desire to be revered or lionised for reaching certain outcomes,” he said. “We are not mass media icons. We are judges, nothing more and nothing less.”

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Though perhaps not the “mass media icon” that fellow justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become to many on the left, Thomas is well-known.

In 1991 his confirmation hearings were attended by high drama over accusations of sexual misconduct. Two decades later, he is the subject of both a new biographical study, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, and a new documentary film.

In the film, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, the 71-year-old justice, known for rarely asking questions in supreme court hearings, speaks to camera for close to two hours.

In its review, Variety called the film “a monologue of self-justification, a two-hour infomercial for the decency, the competence, and the conservative role-model aspirationalism of Clarence Thomas”.

Director Michael Pack, meanwhile, told the Federalist: “I think he just got tired of having his story coming out in a distorted form. He got tired of his enemies and the people who don’t like him spreading half-truths and misrepresentations and outright lies, actually, sometimes about him.”