Justice Thomas Cheered at Chapman : Controversy a No-Show as Supreme Court Member Speaks to Friendly Crowd

Groups as diverse as the National Bar Assn. and a suburban Maryland high school have discovered that merely inviting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be a guest speaker can become a lightning rod for controversy.

That was not the case, though, when the justice spoke Wednesday at Chapman University School of Law, delivering the keynote address at a ceremony to rename the Chapman law building after Donald P. Kennedy, chairman of the board at First American Financial Corp. and a trustee and benefactor of the university.

After taking questions from students in an expansive private session that lasted more than an hour, Thomas addressed an audience of several hundred in front of the 4-year-old law school’s new $25-million building on the university campus in Orange. He met with a friendly reception, including standing ovations at the start and finish of his remarks.

“Now, some might think that the last thing this country needs is more lawyers,” Thomas said. “But if you reflect for just a moment, you will realize that the problem is not that we have too many lawyers. The problem is that we have too few lawyers truly dedicated to the higher aspirations of the law. Too few who understand that this great nation of ours is great precisely because it is devoted to the rule of law, and not the rule of men. Too few who view the education they receive in halls not unlike this one as something more than just a ticket to pecuniary riches. Too few who understand, like our nation’s founders, that when we submit the baser side of our natures to the rule of noble law, we rise above our passions and partake, in some small degree, of the divine.”

Thomas offered strong praise for the fledgling law school and for the faculty members who have helped to get it started. “Scholars of such distinction who would commit themselves to a law school even before it was accredited have to be committed to something higher than themselves,” he said.

The law school was awarded provisional accreditation from the American Bar Assn. in 1998. It will be eligible in February for full accreditation.

While he does make occasional appearances, Thomas speaks publicly less often than several of his colleagues on the court. The Supreme Court does not keep records of how often the various justices appear in public, court officials said.

Thomas is not always as popular a guest speaker as he proved to be Wednesday at Chapman. His invitation last year to address the National Bar Assn., the nation’s largest organization of black lawyers, set off several weeks of turmoil within the group. And in 1996, Thomas was invited to address a high school graduation in Maryland, uninvited when several black school board members protested, then finally reinvited.

In a Wednesday morning question-and-answer session with law students that was closed to the press, Thomas reportedly told students that he had never imagined he would become a judge, much less a justice on the Supreme Court only 20 years after graduating from law school.

Second-year law student Graham Forrester of Garden Grove said Thomas talked about his upbringing, recalling that he became more conservative while at Yale Law School.

Forrester said he asked Thomas if an oral argument ever persuades him to change his mind about a case. “He said most of the time it does not,” Forrester said.

The justice also addressed one question about his feelings during his tumultuous confirmation hearings in 1991, which Thomas characterized at the time as “a high-tech lynching.”

Thomas said his statement had been misinterpreted, students said. “He said that the press interpreted it one way because he was black,” Forrester said. “But he told us that lynchings originally started in the Wild West.”