'Shut Up' Is Justice Thomas’ Message to Colleagues
Justice Clarence Thomas said he was going for “shock value” when he answered a question last week about his fellow justices’ penchant for oral-argument questions with some blunt advice.
“My colleagues should shut up!” he said, in comments published by the U.S. News & World Report blog, Washington Whispers.
Speaking at an event sponsored by a Michigan college, Thomas said that in the past, most U.S. Supreme Court justices rarely asked questions. “What’s changed?” he asked. “And why are all these questions necessary? That should be the question.”
“We are there to decide cases, not to engage in seminar discussions,” he said. “I think that they should ask questions, but I don’t think that for judging, and for what we are doing, all those questions are necessary.”
The New York Times blog, The Lede, noted Thomas’ comments and published a chart of how often justices spoke in the first 19 case hearings of the term—the answer was 2,244 times. The information compiled by legal blog the DailyWrit showed Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. spoke the most often—an average of 23 times per case, followed by Justice Antonin Scalia, who chimed in an average of 22 times.
A hat tip to How Appealing, which posted the stories.
