There was an excellent interview with Clarence Thomas in the Wall Street Journal this weekend. I was fortunate to get to speak with him when I was a law student and he visited my law school. I have great admiration for the writing and judicial reasoning of Clarence Thomas, As he said in the interview:"I don't put myself in a category. Maybe I am labeled as an originalist or something, but it's not my constitution to play around with. Let's just start with that. We're citizens. It's our country, it's our constitution. I don't feel I have any particular right to put my gloss on your constitution. My job is simply to interpret it."
In that process, the first place to look is the document itself. "And when I can't find something in that document or in the tradition or history around that document, then I am getting on dangerous ground. Because that's when you drift so much more towards your own policy preferences."It is the insertion of those policy preferences into the interpretive process that Mr. Thomas finds particularly illegitimate. "People can say you are an originalist, I just think that we should interpret the Constitution as it's drafted, not as we would have
drafted it."
I agree. A judges personal opinion of an issue shouldn’t affect how he or she decides a case. For instance, while I support same sex marriage, I do not think that the Constitution requires it. If all judges stuck to interpreting the law as written, judicial nominations would be far less politically contentious.
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