Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. were separated by a year at Yale Law School, but they were worlds apart when it came to their presence on campus.
Justice Thomas revealed earlier this year that he once asked his colleague why they weren’t friends, and he said Justice Alito’s reply was, “Clarence, you were scary.”
In an interview this week with The Washington Times, Justice Alito explained it all.
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“He was an intimidating figure,” Justice Alito recalled.
“In those days, I think he was doing a lot of lifting. Very, very muscular. But I remember him wearing his overalls without a shirt,” he said.
“The image of him that sticks in my mind, I told him this and I think he’s repeated it, he’s in the courtyard at Yale Law School. … He’s in there at one end, he’s dressed like this on a spring day. And he picks up a football, throws like a rocket, all the way, all the way across the courtyard.”
“This is a formidable guy,” Justice Alito concluded.
Justice Thomas was a year ahead of Justice Alito at the law school.
And the way Justice Alito describes it, they weren’t studying the same things.
“He took a lot more hard, technical courses than I did,” Justice Alito said. “He really liked tax.”
Justice Alito spoke to The Times ahead of the publication this week of his new book “So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court and our Country.”
Justice Thomas, in the interview for Sen. Ted Cruz’s “Verdict” podcast where he told the “scary” story, said he had been destined to be a tax lawyer but didn’t get any job offers from firms after his graduation.
The only offer he got was to work for the Republican attorney general in Missouri, which he said was an odd fit for a law school graduate who’d just voted for left-wing George McGovern for president.
“But for [the firms that didn’t offer him a job] I’d be a tax lawyer someplace,” Justice Thomas said.
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