Clarence Thomas, (born June 23, 1948, Pin Point, near Savannah, Ga., U.S.), U.S. jurist. He graduated from Yale Law School and served as assistant attorney general in Missouri (1974–77), lawyer for Monsanto Co. (1977–79), legislative assistant to Sen. John Danforth (1979–81), assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education (1981–82), and chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) (1982–90). Pres. George H.W. Bush nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1989; he was confirmed in 1990. Bush then nominated Thomas to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1991. Thomas’s confirmation hearings were dominated by questions about his views on abortion and by accusations of sexual harassment by Anita Hill, a law professor and former colleague of Thomas at the EEOC. He denied Hill’s claims. The Senate narrowly voted to confirm him in 1991, and Thomas became the second African American justice on the court, after Thurgood Marshall, whom he replaced. As a Supreme Court justice, Thomas’s voting pattern has been conservative, and he has insisted that the Constitution gives the federal government only limited powers. He is a practitioner and advocate of the philosophy of constitutional interpretation known as originalism. Among the notable court decisions during his tenure are Bush v. Gore, in which he joined four other conservative justices in a ruling that effectively decided the 2000 presidential election in favor of George W. Bush, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), in which he joined the majority opinion that argued there is no constitutional right to abortion, thereby overturning Roe v. Wade (1973).
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