Justice Thomas Underscores He Has No Plans to Retire
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U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was adamant on March 30 when he told a friendly Pepperdine University School of Law audience that he had no plans to retire from the court.
News reports after the event reported that the 70-year-old Thomas said he was not retiring anytime soon, quashing rumors that he planned to do so during the term of President Donald Trump. But a video of the event posted for the first time on Thursday makes it clear it was not just a casual statement.
During a conversation in front of the audience at a Beverly Hills hotel, incoming Pepperdine University president James Gash, who once interviewed to be a clerk for Thomas, hypothetically asked the justice who he would like to have speak at his retirement party in 20 years.
“But I’m not retiring!” Thomas said emphatically.
“Twenty years?” Gash asked.
“No!” Thomas replied.
“Thirty years?”
Again, Thomas said, “No!”
Thomas was just as assertive during the rest of the conversation on topics ranging from how he hires his law clerks to the role religion plays in judicial decision-making, and Thomas’s own deep faith as a Catholic.
Gash asked him about the statement made in 2017 by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, during the confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit: “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that is a concern.”
Thomas quickly replied, “I thought we got away from religious tests.” He said he followed Justice Antonin Scalia’s admonition that personal views had no role to play in judging. But he said that religion plays a positive role in the sense that when he took his oath to follow the law, he made an oath to God as well. “It enhances your view of the oath,” Thomas said.
Thomas added that the oath was a reminder that “you are not God,” a valuable thing to remember in Washington, which he said is a “dangerous place.” Inside the Supreme Court itself, he said, “If you don’t have faith or humility, your ego can expand quickly. It is a dangerous place.”
The justice, who told the audience that he ran away from the Catholic Church in 1968 but “crawled back in 1993,” said he starts his workdays by attending church.
“When you start the day on your knees, you approach your job differently,” he said. “It’s hard to feel you are superior.”
Brittney Lane Kubisch, a Pepperdine Law graduate who clerked for Thomas in 2017 and 2018, also spoke at the event, stating that her year with the justice taught her “to be a good person before a good lawyer.”
As for hiring his clerks, Thomas said he looks for “hungry” young people from modest circumstances with “a lot of horsepower,” joking that when one of his clerks said he worked 16½ hours a day, he replied, “That’s reasonable.” He also looks, without hesitation, to potential clerks from colleges and universities other than Harvard or Yale.
Thomas said all communications with clerks in his chambers are sent as emails to and from all of the clerks. “We don’t have any internal secrets or games.”
Just inside his chambers, Thomas said he hung up four coat hooks and a sign that said, “Hang Egos Here.”
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