A Long Overdue Re-evaluation.(Clarence Thomas)

"On the court, [Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas] has defined a deep, clearly personal jurisprudence anchored in an originalism that is receiving some scholarly respect. Combining this with his emotional, off-the-bench pronouncements on self-help and duty, Thomas has etched a new, more positive narrative of his life onto the public consciousness -- a parable for his own proposition that through perseverance, all adversity can be overcome. Respect can be earned. `He has become a judge through and through,' says Drake University Law School Professor Thomas Baker."

Tony Mauro, American Lawyer, August 6, 2001

"Clarence Thomas no longer gets bad press. To the contrary, media treatments these days often are substantially positive."

Terry Eastland, Washington Times, October 26

My excuse, lame as it is, is that I am not a lawyer. So it wasn't until I read Terry Eastland's intriguing op-ed in the Washington Times that I discovered that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is no longer routinely, habitually vilified by academicians.

Not that this staunchly anti-Roe v. Wade justice will ever be embraced by either academia or the Media Establishment the way hyper pro-Roe Justice Thurgood Marshall was. (Marshall was Thomas's predecessor on the High Court.) And there still is a barely suppressed media reflex to clobber a man many reporters dismiss as too independent, too conservative, too everything-they-don't-like.

But what Eastland and Tony Mauro, author of a piece that appeared in American Lawyer that both complimented and belittled Thomas, agree on is that the 53-year-old Thomas is just coming into his own. Mauro quotes Professor David Garrow, no less, a man who had authored a book so relentlessly pro-abortion it could and should have been dedicated to Planned Parenthood.