Judging Thomas

On the desk in Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court chambers sits a framed sign that reads: "There's no limit to what you can do or where you can go if you don't mind who gets the credit." There is some irony in that. From the moment Thomas was nominated last July through his dramatic confirmation hearings, critics attributed his meteoric rise to affirmative action, tokenism or the narrow political calculations of George Bush. But now that the term is finished, Thomas alone can claim credit for one of the more obstreperous first-year performances on the Supreme Court in recent memory.

Though he told friends after his confirmation that he wanted to be out of the spotlight for a while, Thomas' first-term rulings were pugnacious, blunt and, for a new Justice, relatively numerous. He wrote nine opinions for the majority, four concurrences and eight dissents. "Thomas hit the ground running," says University of Michigan law professor Yale Kamisar. "He's in there mixing it up."

That may have been his way of demonstrating that he was undaunted by Anita Hill's sexual-harassment charges and the Senate's lukewarm 52-48 confirmation vote -- one of the thinnest margins in court history. As in the abortion ruling last week, he has linked up with the court's hard-line conservatives, , Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. These three have often combined with Byron White and three more moderate conservatives, Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter, thus giving the court a conservative majority in most important cases last term.

No sooner had Thomas arrived than he gravitated to Scalia. The pair not only voted alike in 56 out of 90 decisions, but Thomas can write in language that brings to mind Scalia's occasional let's-you-and-me-scrap tone. "Jurors do not leave their knowledge of the world behind when they enter a courtroom," Thomas scolded the other Justices in one dissent. "And they do not need to have the obvious spelled out in painstaking detail."

If Thomas is taking cues from Scalia, it is not during long tete-a-tetes; associates say the two rarely talk. But they clearly share a judicial philosophy. Both take a narrow view of the Constitution. Rights not spelled out explicitly in the text, such as the right to abortion, are not recognized, and both men want to cut back the role of the federal judiciary, leaving more authority to the President, Congress and the state legislatures. Perhaps most significant, they don't approach precedent on tiptoe. Thomas and Scalia are happy to challenge -- with dynamite -- the decisions of earlier, more liberal courts.