DALLAS — On May 7, 2026, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas became the second longest-serving justice in U.S. history, surpassing Justice Stephen Field, who had served for 34 years and 195 days from 1863 to 1897. If Thomas remains on the Court until May 2028, he will surpass Justice William O. Douglas as the longest-serving justice in American history.
Thomas marked the milestone weeks after delivering remarks in Dallas where he critiqued the legal doctrine of stare decisis, the principle of adhering to precedent. "I always say that when someone uses stare decisis, that means they're out of arguments. Now they're just waving the white flag. And I just keep going."
He has long expressed skepticism toward judicial precedent he views as inconsistent with the Constitution’s original meaning. In a concurring opinion in Gamble v. United States (2019), Thomas wrote: “In my view, the Court's typical formulation of the stare decisis standard does not comport with our judicial duty under Article III because it elevates demonstrably erroneous decisions—meaning decisions outside the realm of permissible interpretation—over the text of the Constitution and other duly enacted federal law.”
Thomas has applied this approach across multiple areas of constitutional law. In his dissent in Garza v. Idaho (2019), he argued that the Sixth Amendment guarantees only the right to bring an attorney to court, not a right to state-provided counsel. He wrote: “Neither of these opinions [Powell and Gideon] attempted to square the expansive rights they recognized with the original meaning of the ‘right . . . to have the Assistance of Counsel.’” He added that “there is no substantive right to a particular level of reliability. In assuming otherwise, our ever-growing right-to-counsel precedents directly conflict with the government's legitimate interest in the finality of criminal judgments.”
He has similarly challenged Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. In his dissent in Carpenter v. United States (2018), Thomas called for overruling Katz v. United States, writing: “The Katz test has no basis in the text or history of the Fourth Amendment,” and labeling it “a failed experiment.” In Collins v. Virginia (2018), he questioned the Court’s authority to impose the exclusionary rule on states, stating: “We have not yet revisited that question in light of our modern precedents, which reject Mapp's essential premise that the exclusionary rule is required by the Constitution. We should do so.”
Thomas has also criticized First Amendment precedent, writing in McKee v. Cosby (2019): “New York Times and the Court's decisions extending it were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.”