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On Thursday, the single greatest living American used the occasion of his 74th birthday to remind us of his greatness. He did so by issuing the single piece of writing that, at least thus far, best encapsulates and defines his career as one of the most towering constitutionalists in the history of the republic.

It is unfortunate that Justice Clarence Thomas, an intellectual trailblazer of an originalist constitutional interpretive methodology who celebrated his 30-year anniversary on the Supreme Court last fall, had to date failed to pen a Court majority opinion that law students and legal practitioners could readily point to as his signature achievement—his juridical magnum opus . Much of Thomas’ most impactful, and certainly culturally salient, writings have come in dissent. He has of course had ample opportunity to write majority opinions over the span of his illustrious Court tenure, but those majority opinions have typically come in more arcane legal realms, such as habeas corpus.

All of that changed with Thomas’ 63-page majority opinion in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen case, this Supreme Court term’s marquee Second Amendment case. Thomas’ majority opinion, which came a mere two days after the formal release of Michael Pack and Mark Paoletta’s new book, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words , extends a natural intellectual arc from his prior writings in this hotly contested jurisprudential area. In 2008, Thomas signed onto the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority decision in District of Columbia v. Heller , which for the first time in the Court’s history established that the Second Amendment secures an individual right to possess a firearm. And he wrote a prolific concurrence in the 2010 McDonald v. City of Chicago case, which “incorporated” the Second Amendment substantive gun-owning right against the 50 states.

But for […]

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