Thomas's Originalist Views Shifted From Dissents to Dominance Over 35 Years

Thomas arrived on the court in the early 1990s, when his conservative, originalist views were often relegated to dissenting opinions. Three and a half decades later, he is the second-longest-serving justice in the court's history and regularly finds himself in the majority. Thirty-five years ago, mainstream legal training suggested that interpreting a legal document meant probing for nebulous concepts such as legislative history and legislative intent.

Thomas, along with his then-colleagues Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist, galvanized an intellectual revolution in American legal and judicial practice. Today, law schools instruct students to begin with the text, a notion that is hardly controversial. As liberal Justice Elena Kagan put it in a 2015 Harvard Law School lecture, "we're all textualists now. The straightforward nature of the originalist and textualist position quickly found mass appeal, putting defenders of legislative history or "living constitutionalism on their back feet.