Source: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/justice-thomas-criminal-justice-and-originalisms-legitimacy
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 16:51:33+00:00

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After a quarter of a century on the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence in the field of criminal law offers no shortage of themes to discuss, but it especially shows how he has advanced originalism as a respected methodology.1 Often both the political and academic commentary about originalism focuses on Justice Antonin Scalia. In the wake of his death a year ago, that focus has been understandable. Justice Scalia left a tremendous legacy. His scholarly output, outsized personality, and zealous advocacy on behalf of originalism have bestowed great benefits on our legal culture by focusing the attention of judges and attorneys toward neutral principles and away from subjective policy preferences.2 But if Justice Scalia bore significant responsibility for advancing the popular understanding of originalism, then Justice Thomas deserves singular credit for strengthening the case for its legitimacy.
By writing well-reasoned originalist opinions that can be evaluated on neutral grounds—such as the strength of the historical evidence or the coherence of the textual analysis—Justice Thomas has advanced the methodology of originalism in two ways. First, by providing a second originalist voice on the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas has made it impossible for lawyers and judges to ignore originalist arguments. Second, and more importantly, by writing opinions that often disagreed with those of Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas has rebutted the conventional criticism that originalism is a wooden or results-oriented methodology.
Justice Thomas’s jurisprudence in criminal law provides several examples of how his additional presence on the Supreme Court has helped aim litigants’ attention toward where originalists focus: text and history. For one, Justice Thomas sparked the development of precedents about the original meaning of the Confrontation Clause.3 Before the appointments of Justices Scalia and Thomas, courts reviewed challenges under the Confrontation Clause to the admission of hearsay evidence under the rule established by Ohio v. Roberts.4 That rule required courts to consider whether the hearsay bore “indicia of reliability.”5 If a court determined that the hearsay was reliable, then the prosecution could introduce it as evidence at trial without producing the declarant for cross-examination.
Consider, too, the effect Justice Thomas has had on sentencing law. Four years ago in Alleyne v. United States,13 Justice Thomas wrote an opinion for the Court that overruled Harris v. United States14 in part because it was “inconsistent . . . with the original meaning of the Sixth Amendment.”15 And he did so without Justice Scalia, who dissented. By providing a second originalist voice on the Court, Justice Thomas increased the likelihood of success for parties who litigated their appeals using originalist methods of analysis. Justice Thomas’s opinion in Alleyne also caused several non-originalist judges to acknowledge originalism as an authoritative methodology. Not only did Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan join the statement that Harris was “inconsistent . . . with the original meaning of the Sixth Amendment,”16 but Justice Sotomayor wrote a concurring opinion, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Kagan, that began by reiterating that the Court’s ruling was consistent with “the original meaning of the Sixth Amendment.”17 Those statements make sense only if originalism can be a legitimate and authoritative methodology.
Justice Thomas has also advanced originalism in a second way: By disagreeing with Justice Scalia on originalist grounds, Justice Thomas has made clear that originalism is not a political tool for reaching “conservative” results. Some commentators have portrayed originalism as a façade jurists and academics hide behind to pursue their policy preferences.18 But although no methodology is immune from abuse, Justice Thomas’s opinions have established that the advantage of originalism is not that it provides a foolproof method for arriving at uniform results, but that it offers neutral principles suitable for a judiciary in a democratic republic with separated powers. By engaging in debates with Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas has focused our attention on the neutral materials in law—text and history—and weakened the criticism that originalism is results oriented. Originalism may not eliminate reasonable disagreement among jurists, but it helps to discipline legal debates.
Justices Thomas and Scalia reached opposite conclusions in cases under the Confrontation Clause and the Excessive Fines Clause, for example, but each sought to apply the original meaning of those Clauses. Each reviewed the text and historical record and reached a separate conclusion about what the law is.
The dueling opinions in Bajakajian are a good example of appropriate disagreement between originalists. Several federal statutes enacted by the First Congress contemporaneously with the Eighth Amendment allowed either the forfeiture of the entire amount of goods or a monetary penalty proportional to the goods’ value.38 Justice Thomas reviewed those laws and determined that they were not analogous to the law in Bajakajian. He concluded that the statutes allowing forfeiture of all goods involved in a customs offense pertained to in rem actions directed against the property, not the owner.39 And the statutes that required monetary forfeitures proportionate to the value of the goods involved were remedial, not punitive, because they reimbursed the government for losses incurred by customs evasion.40 Justice Thomas concluded that the forfeiture in Bajakajian was neither in rem nor remedial and thus could not be justified under those historical examples.41 The dissent rejected Justice Thomas’s classification of the historical forfeiture statutes and argued that in any event the forfeiture provision could be considered remedial because it merely compensated for the government’s investigative and enforcement expenses—expenses that were difficult to quantify.42 Once again, the debate was fought on the battlefield of originalism, and originalism, as a methodology, triumphed.
Of course, not every originalist debate concerns the particulars of a historical record. Sometimes, the debate concerns the application of an agreed-upon general rule to a modern problem. In those cases, Justice Thomas’s and Justice Scalia’s dueling opinions have illustrated that originalism is not a methodology of results, but of process. Reasonable jurists can and do reach different conclusions by applying that process without invoking pragmatic or policy-oriented reasoning.
A second area where Justices Thomas and Scalia agreed on a legal rule but disagreed on how to apply it was in determining whether statutory mandatory minimum sentences violated the right to a jury trial. Both Justices agreed with the rule established in Apprendi v. New Jersey that any fact, other than a prior conviction, that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the statutory maximum must be proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.51 And both voted to invalidate mandatory sentencing guidelines that required judges to find facts that would increase sentencing ranges.52 But the Justices disagreed about why mandatory sentencing guidelines were problematic. Justice Scalia saw the problem as permitting fact-finding to increase the ceiling of a judge’s discretion in a way that could disadvantage a defendant. Justice Thomas, on the other hand, saw the problem as changing the range of discretion, even if the sentencing ceiling remained unchanged.
As an aside, I respectfully disagree with both Justices Scalia’s and Thomas’s decisions to join in the majority opinions in Blakely55 and Booker,56 the foundational decisions underlying Alleyne. The notion that mandatory guidelines that regulate judicial discretion within a statutory range of punishment to reduce sentencing disparities somehow violates a defendant’s right to a jury trial even though it is entirely permissible for judges, in an indeterminate system, to find sentencing facts and impose punishments anywhere within a broad statutory range has never made sense to me. I side with another Yalie, Justice Samuel Alito, on that one.57 But accepting the logic of Blakely and Booker that the Sixth Amendment requires a jury to find all facts essential to the potential penalty,58 only Justice Thomas’s position in Alleyne makes sense.
In both Navarette and Alleyne, Justices Thomas and Scalia agreed on the underlying rule but disagreed about how that rule should apply in a modern context. Together, they disproved the notion that an originalist methodology is useful only for adjudicating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century appeals or that originalism is merely a justification for “conservative” results. Their dueling opinions proved that originalism inevitably produces occasional disagreement. But that disagreement is constrained by fundamental principles about what law is, and it contrasts favorably with methodologies that rely on more subjective notions about policy and pragmatism.
By leading, joining, and occasionally challenging Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas, over the last quarter of a century, has accomplished what no originalist by himself could: through principled adjudication, proving that originalism can be an objective methodology for adjudication. His contributions have increased respect for originalism exponentially and made its vocabulary a staple of constitutional adjudication. And for those contributions, all originalists owe him a debt of gratitude.
William H. Pryor Jr. is a Circuit Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and the Acting Chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. I thank my law clerk, Josh Divine, for his expert research and citation assistance.
Preferred Citation: William H. Pryor Jr., Justice Thomas, Criminal Justice, and Originalism’s Legitimacy, 127 Yale L.J. F. 173 (2017), http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/justice-thomas-criminal-justice-and-originalisms-legitimacy.
448 U.S. 56 (1980), abrogated by Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004).
See id. at 358-66 (Thomas, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment).
133 S. Ct. 2151 (2013).
536 U.S. 545 (2002), overruled by Alleyne, 133 S. Ct. 2151.
Alleyne, 133 S. Ct. at 2155.
Id. at 2164 (Sotomayor, J., concurring).
557 U.S. 305, 308, 329 (2009).
564 U.S. 647, 663-65 (2011).
See Melendez-Diaz, 557 U.S. at 329-30 (Thomas, J., concurring).
132 S. Ct. 2221, 2255, 2260 (2012) (Thomas, J., concurring in the judgment).
E.g., Davis, 547 U.S. at 822.
United States v. Bajakajian, 524 U.S. 321 (1998).
Id. at 325 & n.1.
Id. at 344 (Kennedy, J., dissenting).
Bajakajian, 524 U.S. at 340 (majority opinion).
Id. at 345-47, 351-53 (Kennedy, J., dissenting).
See id. at 1692-93, 1695 (Scalia, J., dissenting).
See 530 U.S. 466, 490 (2000).
Alleyne v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 2151, 2158 (2013) (citing Apprendi, 530 U.S. at 483 n.10).
See id. at 2167-70 (Roberts, C.J., dissenting).
See Gall v. United States, 552 U.S. 38, 64-66 (2007) (Alito, J., dissenting).
See, e.g., Blakely, 542 U.S. at 301.
“Methodology,” as used in this Essay, refers to the philosophy that judges should adjudicate constitutional issues by discerning the original meaning of constitutional provisions and accepting those meanings as authoritative, not the various methods judges use to discern original meaning.
See, e.g., Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law (1997); Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts (2012); see also Jess Bravin, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dies at 79, Wall St. J. (Feb. 14, 2016, 5:41 PM), http://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-justice-antonin-scalia-dead-at-79-1455404229 [http://perma.cc/SP3P-XLQE] (describing Scalia as having “revived a focus on the Constitution’s original meaning”).
U.S. Const. amend. VI (“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him . . . .”).
See Crawford, 541 U.S. at 68-69 (“Roberts notwithstanding, we decline to mine the record in search of indicia of reliability. Where testimonial statements are at issue, the only indicium of reliability sufficient to satisfy constitutional demands is the one the Constitution actually prescribes: confrontation.”).
Cf. Brian Lipshutz, Justice Thomas and the Originalist Turn in Administrative Law, 125 Yale L.J.F. 94 (2015), http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/justice-thomas-and-the-originalist-turn-in-administrative-law [http://perma.cc/HJ7Y-EYVK] (arguing that Justice Thomas has constructed a similar foundation in administrative law).
See, e.g., Jack M. Balkin, Why Are Americans Originalist?, in Law, Society and Community: Socio-Legal Essays in Honour of Roger Cotterrell 309, 313-14, 319-21 (Richard Nobles & David Schiff eds., 2014) (arguing that originalism is used as and has its roots in a political methodology to reverse disliked doctrine); Peter J. Smith, Originalism and Level of Generality, 51 Ga. L. Rev. 1, 53-65, 72 (2017) (arguing that jurists and academics frame issues at varying levels of generality so they can use originalism for results-oriented purposes).
See 547 U.S. 813, 826-28 (2006); id. at 840-42 (Thomas, J., concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part).
See id. at 829-32 (concluding that the statements were inadmissible because they were testimonial); id. at 840-42 (Thomas, J., concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part) (concluding the opposite).
E.g., Davis, 547 at 835-37 (Thomas, J., concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part).
E.g., Ohio v. Clark, 135 S. Ct. 2173, 2186 (2015) (Thomas, J., concurring in the judgment) (quoting White v. Illinois, 502 U.S. 346, 365 (1992) (Thomas, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment)).
See Williams, 132 S. Ct. at 2261 (Thomas, J., concurring in the judgment) (quoting Davis, 547 U.S. at 837).
See U.S. Const. amend. VIII (“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed . . . .”).
For example, Justice Thomas ruled in favor of the criminal defendant, unlike Justice Scalia, in Alleyne and Bajakajian. But their votes were reversed in Navarette v. California, discussed below, and Williams.
U.S. Const. amend. IV (“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . .”).
See United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220, 244 (2005); Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. 296, 303-04 (2004).

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