Justice Clarence Thomas: "I do think what happened at the Court is tremendously bad."

so uh justice um first question is there anything going on at the court these days when you go back to washington could you tell your colleagues that next time they leak an opinion can they just give it to me and i'll link it for them why are they going through these other methods you have too much character um but in seriousness justice uh you know one theme that's come out of this conference i think is the importance of institutions yeah and that institutions are under attack these days um so i thought you might want to comment on the leaks the protests at justice's homes and what we're seeing in the wake of this leak of the alleged dobbs draft opinion well i've first of all it's um a real honor to be here this is it's hard to believe that 40 more than 40 years passed since um i was at fairmont conference which was i was no more enthusiastic about that than i am about this one and i think it started off with an i thought on very electric speech by glenn lowry and it has continued with the thoughtfulness and that's really all we ever wanted and not to replace one orthodoxy with another orthodoxy we had enough of that but rather to assume that people are able to think for themselves to have different ideas because they're unique to exchange different perspectives and perhaps have others either agree with them or sharpen their disagreements but to have a civil discussion that was all that's why it was called new alternatives uh it was an alternative to uh it's the kind of alternatives you would want in a uh what we thought at least in a civil society and um it certainly was uh did not was not treated that way and that sort of we were treated very shabbily after that and the the whole idea that your point about institutions i think we are in dangers of destroying the institutions that are required for a free society you can't have a a civil society a free society without a stable legal system you can't have one without stability in things like property or interpretation and impartial judiciary uh and i've been in this business long enough to know just how fragile it is and the institution that i'm a part of if someone said that one line of one opinion would be leaked by anyone and you would say oh that's impossible no one would ever do that there's such a belief in the rule of law belief in the court a belief in what we were doing that that was verboten it was beyond anyone's understanding or at least anyone's imagination that someone would do that and look where we are where now that trust or that belief is gone forever the and when you lose that trust especially in the institution that i'm in uh it changes the institution fundamentally uh you begin to look over your shoulder it's like kind of an infidelity on that you can explain it but you can't undo it and the and i think you're seeing it go through any number of our institutions whether it's in the political branches or whether it's in the universities when i went to a university to college it was the fun place where you were not that well informed but boy you debated all night and then the people with whom you argued just like the supreme court uh no no um the so the but the friends that you made during that time you kept for life you uh you and you pick up the arguments ten years later and you're still arguing and you're still loving being around each other you remember the bad pizza and uh too many uh mugs of beer and a reason why many of us don't drink anymore but my point is simply that there's that even the universities have changed i was at the university of georgia about a year ago and i met with a lot of students and their question was why can't we in the general society debate difficult things anymore and i said to them and these were small groups i met with a group of 10 students 15 separate groups for about an hour it was very exhausting but enormously enormously informative and the on the you know i said to them that to me the epicenter of free speech when i was in it was at the university that's where you learn how to to engage with people who disagreed with you that's where you learned how to deal with ideas and address ideas that you had not you were not with which you were not familiar previously or with which you disagreed and it was back and forth and i just loved it and we called them rap sessions back then and they said i said but now look at your university where this is university of georgia i said how many of you can take a view on this campus of traditional families and of course nobody or you got a lot of people staring at the floor how many of you can take a pro-life position on this campus staring at the floor and as you go on and on uh you take positions that are obviously at odds with the current mood on these campuses now this is a this is where you learn how to deal with views that are different now if you don't learn at that point the law schools are just as bad now at john's alma mater yale uh the um they just did you give your degree back again uh yale does not recognize me me either okay oh so we're in the same boat but um they just protested uh a group uh and made it very difficult for others to come and certainly had a chilling effect now yale was when i was there visiting it was anything goes as you do your thing i do my thing and maybe too much of that but it certainly wasn't prior restraint and it certainly wasn't censorship but here we are where that's acceptable at one of the elite universities it's and it's pretty much acceptable at all the universities and if they if we're there with these institutions how do we recover so yeah i do think that the the what happened at the court is tremendously bad i think it's um i wonder how long we're going to have uh these institutions at the rate we're undermining them and then i wonder when they're gone or they are destabilized what we will have as a country and i don't think that the prospects are good if uh if we continue to lose them thank you well i know you can't speak much more about the court so maybe we could

Channel: C-SPAN

Views: 122,933

Keywords: Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade, Institution, SCOTUS, C-SPAN, CSPAN

Id: -xahFK1ocFk

Length: 8min 41sec (521 seconds)

Published: Sat May 14 2022