Samuel Alito Thought Clarence Thomas Was ‘Scary’ In Law School

Imagine learning that one of your future Supreme Court colleagues didn’t befriend you in law school because he found you terrifying.

Justice Clarence Thomas recently sat down for a rare interview with Senator Ted Cruz on his “Verdict” podcast, where the conversation turned to Justice Samuel Alito. The two justices overlapped at Yale Law School for two years but didn’t know each other at the time. As noted by Fox News, Thomas eventually asked Alito why.

“So I said, ‘Sam, how come we were there two years together? Why weren’t we friends?'” Thomas recalled. 

“‘Clarence, you were scary,'” Thomas said Alito told him.

Samuel Alito thought Clarence Thomas was scary? Has he read any of his own opinions?

To be fair, Thomas apparently cultivated a rather intimidating law-school aesthetic. He wore bib overalls and combat boots around Yale, which may not have screamed “future Supreme Court justice” so much as “I came prepared to dismantle this tractor — and perhaps the administrative state.”

“I’m so glad they didn’t have these phones where you could take a lot of pictures,” Thomas said.

We’re glad too, but only because the country may not be emotionally prepared for Clarence Thomas’s law-school fashion archive. Somewhere between the overalls, combat boots, and radical politics Thomas embraced at the time, young Samuel Alito apparently decided that discretion was the better part of friendship.

This is especially amusing given that Alito would eventually become pretty scary in his own right, at least jurisprudentially speaking. He wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs, overturning nearly five decades of precedent and transforming the constitutional landscape. That opinion was much more frightening to many legal observers than a pair of combat boots could ever be.

Meanwhile, Thomas remains scary to plenty of court watchers today. In his Dobbs concurrence, he suggested that the Court should reconsider its substantive due process precedents, specifically naming Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Apparently, once Thomas traded his bib overalls for judicial robes, he found an even more effective way to make people nervous.

It seems Alito’s instincts at Yale weren’t entirely wrong. Thomas was scary then because of the combat boots. He’s scary now because his concurrences occasionally read like a preview of which precedents may be placed on the chopping block next.

Of course, Alito probably shouldn’t be tossing around the word “scary” without taking a long look in the mirror, preferably one that reflects his own body of work. These days, both justices are capable of sending a shiver through the legal world with a single opinion.

They may not have been friends at Yale, but they eventually became a frighteningly effective pair on the Supreme Court. Better late than never?

Clarence Thomas says Alito found him ‘scary’ at Yale Law School [Fox News]

---

Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.