Not Following the ‘Leader’ Greenhouse

[elleng]

'Almost everywhere I’ve traveled this fall, people have asked me whether it’s true that Justice Clarence Thomas is the real, if under-appreciated, intellectual leader of the Supreme Court.

Invariably, my questioners have read Jeffrey Toobin’s provocative “Annals of Law” piece in the Aug. 29 New Yorker that made this claim: “In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court.” True, the author referred to an intellectual leader, rather than the, but the article went on to assert that “the implications of Thomas’s leadership for the court, and for the country, are profound.” . . .

Unless the court accepts either his view that anything goes, which it won’t, or the view advocated by another retired justice, John Paul Stevens, that almost nothing goes, which it also won’t, those determined to claim a corner of the public square in which to display their religious devotion will keep on doing it, and we appear doomed to be ruled in this realm, as in so many others, by the case-by-case exercise of human judgment. A scary thought – perhaps one that scared the justices themselves as, contemplating whether to grant the Utah case, they stood on the brink with Clarence Thomas and decided not to jump.'

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/02/leading-from-behind/?hp