I'm Elizabeth Lattery and I'm Tiffany Bates.

Welcome to SCOTUS 101, where we break down what's happening at the Supreme Court,

what the justices are up to, and other things related to our favorite branch of government.

This week we're talking about Justice Thomas's recent speech,

big cases coming up for conference, and we'll interview appellate lawyer John Elwood. So Justice Clarence Thomas spoke at the

Federalist Society Student Symposium, and Tiffany, you were in attendance. I was. Yeah, so tell us

about his talk. Yeah, it's always a pleasure to hear Justice Thomas Speak and this time was no different.

It's not just me.

The crowd loved him.

When he was introduced, he got a standing ovation.

Of course.

And he gets so much, yeah, flack from the left.

It was really nice to see these 800 or so law students who really admire him, you know, showing him some love.

The format was conversation style

with Jen Maskot, a GMU professor, and his former law clerk. And she asked him a lot of really

thoughtful questions. He talked briefly about textualism and how it's just such a natural thing

because words have meaning. And he said, I think we're all textualists. When you see a stop sign, you

stop. You don't say, oh, officer, I was looking at it more in a normative way, which was really

funny. There were quite a few questions that he brought back to the topic of civility. He said he was

reading a book about the tutors, and he thinks it's like we're going back to the

Tower of London except we're executing people with words and attacking people and not just ideas.

And he spoke of Justice Ginsburg and said, you know, she's not my enemy. She's my colleague

...