During a closed-door session of a legal conference this week, Justice Clarence Thomas expressed concerns that the Supreme Court faced increasing polarization, incivility and security threats, including one that apparently led the justice to appear at the event remotely instead of in-person as planned.
In rare remarks, Justice Thomas told a crowd of lawyers and students gathered at American University’s law school that he had hoped to attend the event but that a security risk had forced him to alter his plans, according to a recording of the event obtained by The New York Times.
“I apologize for having to change things, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t endanger anyone by my mere presence,” he said, appearing from the Capitol Hill office of Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, without specifying the security concern.
“At the same time, I encourage you not to follow the example of the things that have happened that prevent us from being together,” the justice added.
The unusual episode offered a reminder of the heightened threats facing judges — including the justices — in recent years, as well as of the wall the Supreme Court has often erected around the justices, who do few interviews and make only periodic public appearances.
All nine justices have received increased security since the leak in 2022 of the court’s draft decision to eliminate the nationwide right to abortion. Since then, threats against judges of all kinds have risen, particularly as President Trump, his advisers and his allies have harshly attacked the legitimacy of the jurists who rule against the administration.
Justice Thomas’s remarks to the conference this week were closed to the news media “due to an agreement between our organization and Justice Thomas’s team,” according to an official with the J. Reuben Clark Law Society, the event’s sponsor, a legal organization named for an early 20th-century Mormon leader and prominent lawyer.
In addition to Justice Thomas, the group’s two-day conference drew academics, high-profile lawyers, Mormon Church leaders and Trump administration officials, including Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative.
Before the event, student groups had expressed opposition on social media to the justice’s planned appearance, circulating messages asking, “Why is Clarence Thomas Speaking at AU?”
People who attended the conference on Thursday afternoon said a group of about a dozen who appeared to be students had gathered outside the venue to protest the justice’s appearance and the Trump administration. They carried placards with the message “No Kings.”
It was not clear whether the protest was the security concern that prompted Justice Thomas to cancel his in-person appearance. A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment. In general, the court does not comment on the justices’ security.
Senator Lee also participated remotely in the conference, delivering remarks earlier in the day during a ceremony to hand out an award named for his father, Rex E. Lee, who had been solicitor general during the Reagan administration and later became president of Brigham Young University.
Justice Thomas’s comments were part of a wide-ranging conversation that also included Senator Lee and Gene Schaerr, a lawyer who was a former associate counsel to President George H.W. Bush and now runs a conservative litigation firm and teaches at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young.
“I think it says so much about where we are,” Justice Thomas said. “That we are sitting here and the people we are speaking to are sitting there, when in a civil society, we would all be sitting in the same room, at the same table, even as we disagree.”
He reminisced about the Supreme Court as it was when he joined in 1991. The makeup of the bench did not change for 11 years, until Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. arrived in 2005. Justice Thomas said the lack of turnover allowed a camaraderie that he contrasted with what he called the nation’s current lack of civility. Eight or nine of the justices would have lunch together almost every day, he said, even as they had strong disagreements over cases.
Justice Thomas was upbeat and gregarious as he spoke about his reluctance to become a judge and then a justice. He described his upbringing in rural Georgia, in the segregated South, and how that experience shaped his views on affirmative action and the embrace of a “colorblind” Constitution.
To treat someone “negatively or better based on color” violated the Constitution, he said, adding that it “doesn’t work one way, and you’ve got to accept it both ways.”
Justice Thomas was in the majority in 2023, when the court divided along ideological lines to reject race-conscious programs in college admissions.
When Mr. Schaerr asked the justice how he would celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday, Justice Thomas said Americans should recommit to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He said people needed to do a better job in “being candid” about their differences and said his remote appearance suggested “we have come a long way in the wrong direction.”
Since Mr. Trump was re-elected, the court has routinely divided along ideological lines in allowing the administration to temporarily carry out its policies while litigation over their lawfulness proceeded. The emergency orders in the president’s favor have often drawn sharp, lengthy dissents from the three liberal justices.
Without pointing to any specific cases or decisions, Justice Thomas said he was not a fan of opinions that he described as “a bit too edgy.”
“I don’t like those kinds of opinions simply because it isn’t about me. It isn’t about my emotions. It isn’t about my critique of your style,” he said. “It is about my argument, trying to get it right, and where I disagree with you, trying to get it right, and I respect the fact that you are tying to live up to your oath, as I am trying to live up to mine.”
At 77, Justice Thomas is the oldest justice and could surpass the 36-year record for longest-serving associate justice if he stays on the bench through spring 2028. He insisted he was not keeping track.
“Well, I just get up every day and go to work,” Justice Thomas said. “I don’t do a lot of that counting stuff.”
Ann E. Marimow covers the Supreme Court for The Times from Washington.
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