Yeah, he's famously silent during oral arguments. This is frequently held up as evidence that he's not the sharpest of justices, but that's not necessarily fair (there's plenty of other legitimate evidence for that conclusion, anyway).
It's sort of unfortunate, though. I like listening to the court recordings, and the questions the justices ask give a lot of insight into their thought processes.
he's famously silent
Yeah, I know, but not a single word for an entire term? That's weird.
Yeah, I don't know what's up with that. Maybe somebody jinxed him back in September. Or it's all some elaborate prank.
Clarence Thomas, Clarence Thomas, Clarence Thomas
If there's a jinx, that ought to remove it.
evidence that he's not the sharpest of justices, but that's not necessarily fair
Seems pretty fair to me. Really, what are the alternatives? That he's some kind of mind reader? That he's senile?
Nina Totenberg tells me everything I need to know. Everyone on the court is secondary.
TOTENBERG!
That he decides cases on the briefs and the clerks' research, like the rest of them. That he doesn't love the sound of his own voice as much as Brother Scalia does. That he's still pissed off at the world because of his confirmation fight and isn't willing to give those journalist bastards anything to right about. Etc.
what are the alternatives?
That he knows everything he feels he needs to in order to properly decide the case from the parties' submissions, his own (or his clerks) research, the prepared oral arguments, and the answers to his fellow Justices' questions?
9 to 7.
Thomas is a long way from being a great justice and I'd be thrilled if he left the Court, but he's not a huge outlier for either stupidity or hackishness.
I think 9 may have pwnership of 10.
Kind of important shit going on in front of him. IANAL, but it seems absolutely bizarre to not ask questions. I'm still leaning towards, "not the sharpest tool in the shed."
I will also allow for the possibility of "laziest motherfucker on the bench."
13, 14: Nah. I clerked for a judge that could also go for a year without asking a question at any oral arg, but was sharp as a tack. 10 gets the attitude right; my judge never asked a question unless there was some issue clearly left outstanding, which was rare.
I love Nina Totenberg's dry recitation of the judges' Q&A more than I can express.
7
That he is pathologically shy and self-conscious about speaking in public.
He's dead, and they're trying to keep it quiet until 2009.
He's not a real justice. He's a RealJustice (TM); almost indistinguishable in appearance and skin texture, but without all the tiresome argument and discussion!
That he is pathologically shy
Yeah, you gotta draw him out by talking about his interests. Perhaps a casual reference to Long Dong Silver.
9, 10 and 15 seem right to me. Of course, I am one of those who believe that Thomas is an excellent Justice--perhaps the best of those currently sitting. [rant deleted]
Wow. How could I not have known that Justice Thomas grew up a Geechee speaker?
Yeah, my experience as a lawyer and as a judicial clerk has been that the vast majority of reviewing court judges decide cases based on the written submissions; oral argument is often just a formality.
That said, there's nothing worse than trying to deliver an argument to a silent bench. I have a great deal of gratitude for the judges who ask a few questions with no greater agenda than to help make the argument a bit more conversational. Thomas obviously doesn't have to save anyone from a silent bench, of course. But I suppose an occassional question or two might be nice to signal some respectful engagement.
Maybe he's got some kind of Wittgensteiny "whereof one cannot speak" thing going on.
23 makes a good point. An occasional question or two to signal engagement seems courteous, even if you already have your mind made up.
Also with 9,10, and 15. It's a weird personality quirk, but it doesn't mean much substantively; by the time a case is in the Supreme Court, everything important really should be in the briefs. (If I knew more about Thomas personally I'd start constructing narratives about what it meant -- insecure about his speech patterns? Just plain hates everyone and doesn't want to be there? -- but I don't know a thing about the man beyond what came out in his confirmation hearings.)
"insecure"
Also a very angry man. An outlier oddity that he is sooo conservative.
I'm pretty sure he's addressed this issue before himself, and explained that his rationale is more or less as 9 & 10 suggested: Between the paper trail it takes to get a case to the SC and the invariably lengthy written briefs from the parties & any amici, there's not really a whole lot left to cover in most cases, leaving orals as a bit of ritualistic show. If you're ever bored enough and have enough time to kill, pick a case, listen to orals, and then go back and read all the written briefs. Then look at the decisions. I'm thinking it's the very rare case where you'll find any hint that oral argument served any purpose beyond allowing the justices to telegraph decisions they'd already made.
[rant deleted]
Maybe this is what happened to Thomas.
Of course, I am one of those who believe that Thomas is an excellent Justice--perhaps the best of those currently sitting.
Yeah, that Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld was good stuff. Let's hear it for dictatorships!
16 is why, in my secret heart of hearts, I hope that oral arguments never get televised. Although they sometimes release audio. But never mind that, it's all about the Nina.
23: Maybe, but the current Court is so weighed down with blowhards that this doesn't really seem to be too much of a problem.
hi Julian! I've met Thomas briefly when I was touring the SC with a friend who was clerking. I also got to sit in Scalia's chair, and do the thing where he leans back listening and then SUDDENLY POPS UP and asks some devillishly pointed question. I was sort of tempted to leave gum or something, but not really, because I was kind of star struck by the magic of the highest court in the land (now with Capitalist Realist murals of hammurabi!!), and it was fun listening to the oral arguments.
The part about being self-conscious about speaking "standard English" was particularly interesting, too. The confessed self-consciousness is humanizing, in a way. But how cool would it be if he could just feel comfortable enough with his own background/culture to speak freely and not worry should a Geechee turn of phrase slip out now and then. What could be more American, in that idealistic coming together of cultures sort of way, than to have a justice of the United States Supreme Court unashamedly displaying his unique cultural heritage?
I first heard of geechee/gullah culture watching "Postcards from Buster" on PBS, and found it fascinating to remember that "America" is not the monolithic culture of tv sitcoms. Oh that we would just wear our diversity proudly!
I brought up insecurity first, I think, but I don't think it's terribly likely -- when I've heard Thomas speak, he sounds as General American newscaster as anyone. If there's any residual Gullah in his speech, I really doubt it's beyond anything that would sound decoratively folksy, like those godawful Texas metaphors Dan Rather produces under stress.
18: That would be the Roberts court you're talking about, right? You'd think they'd be thrilled to have the chance to appoint someone even younger than him and even more right-wing. I guess I can see some black comedy scenario going on there like something out of "Very Bad Things," where one or two of the more liberal justices are trying to keep up the illusion that he's alive, but realistically, I think that ship has sailed.
34: My only encounter with Gullah was on a plane many years ago. A family was sitting across the aisle from me and was speaking to each other in what I later determined to be Gullah. If you've never heard it, let me tell you that it can cause a significant level of disorientation. I was listening to a language that had the feel of heavily accented English but I COULD NOT UNDERSTAND A SINGLE WORD.
An interesting experience. Oddly, the flight attendant seemed to have no trouble with it when she came down the aisle with beverages. I guess "Diet Coke" is understandable in any language.
I've run into it when vacationing in Low Country areas, mostly when buying produce or seafood from stands. It's actually a really cool-sounding [creole? dialect? I defer to the linguists here]. Much like in the Caribbean, they can talk to you just fine but if they don't want you to understand them, you absolutely won't. I could have sat and listened to them talk to each other for hours, if it wouldn't have been weird and creepy.
I'm with gswift on this one but purely due to spite; I don't know judges from tree stumps. I find it amusing to imagine that the 281 words were 40 instances of asking, "Scalia, how are you going to vote?" with one instance of a hiccup onto which some desperate litigator projected significance.
If you've never heard it, let me tell you that it can cause a significant level of disorientation. I was listening to a language that had the feel of heavily accented English but I COULD NOT UNDERSTAND A SINGLE WORD.
I feel this way about Dutch. Flying KLM is exciting for me, because whenever the PA announcements switch between English and Dutch, the effect for me is that everything continues to sound like English, while I have apparently been struck with receptive aphasia.
40 - OMG, that happened to me when I was on Aer Lingus. They don't switch to Gaelic until you get to Ireland and I thought I was hallucinating.
I have a similiar experience with Haitian, although I often catch a word or two here and there. Every once in a while I'll take a cab with a Haitian driver and offer to switch to French with them, but at the end of the day, French is also a foreign language to them.
I'm with gswift on this one but purely due to spite; I don't know judges from tree stumps.
Neither do I.
Spite motherfuckers!
Whenever I remember Thomas' characterization of his confirmation hearings as a 'high-tech lynching,' I imagine lasers and banks of computers in the hearing room.
Three things I hate about Clarence Thomas:
1. Adamantly opposes the kind of affirmative action programs that got him where he is.
2. Worked for the pesticide division of Monsanto.
3. Claimed never to have formulated an opinion on Roe v. Wade.
There are more.
"that got him where he is" s/b "that helped to get him where he is," for accuracy's sake.
You know, Idealist is smoking crack calling Thomas a good, or even a non-nightmarish, judge, but he's pretty consistent; knowing what his principles are (screwy though they may be) will get you to his vote more reliably than Scalia. Scalia's just a crook: very bright, and if you hit an issue he isn't biased on a good judge, but mostly he's voting his politics, not the law. Thomas is a nut -- he's mostly voting a consistent version of a screwy conception of the law. (Not always, of course -- Bush v. Gore didn't make sense whatever your philosophy -- but he's more consistent than Scalia.)
OT, but the latest news about Wolfowitz makes me sooooo happy.
Di Kotimy's a lawyer too? Geez, we cannot escape each other.
On the other hand, and this despite my not really liking him, aren't his few and far between questions usually very good? In other words, I think 39 gets it exactly wrong.
I remember in a fourth amendment case, in which the cops were trying to justify some particularly egregious violation as a necessary piece of police procedure, midday through the argument Thomas jumped in out of nowhere and asked the Solicitor "Just to be clear, is [Mr. Defendant] black?" (This information wasn't in the record. And of course the answer was yes.) Thomas voted against the government in that case.
51: That's your example of a good question?
If we're now into damning with faint praise, I remember his ERISA opinions as being pretty good, especially in contrast to Scalia's.
Sort of. At the time and in the context it was a very good question. But that was actually just meant as a nice story. He asks lots of good questions.
They're just not sticking out in my head right now.
Haven't we established that he doesn't ask lots of questions, and thus can't ask lots of good questions?
I'm much less of a Supreme Court buff than I should be (if you see me opining learnedly on a point of law, I just looked up the cases I'm talking about), so I don't actually know offhand. But he could, possibly, ask very few questions, all or most of which are good ones.
57: Yeah, I figure that's what he meant, but I'm just nitpicking Brock's imprecision of language because he's a lawyer and should know better. It's tough love, really.
If Justice Thomas would ask all his questions in Geechee, I might even be able to forgive his awful votes.
60: I would pay good cash money to see/hear that.
59: What I meant was that he asks lots of good questions as a percentage of the total number of questions he asks. Given the context, I thought this was perfectly clear.
62: it was, M/tch was just making trouble.
Given the context, I thought this was perfectly clear.
But what does it being perfectly clear have to do with anything? You sure you're a lawyer Brock?