Justice Clarence Thomas says legal precedents are not 'the gospel'

The conservative justice wants to overturn cases wrongly decided in his view.

By Devin Dwyer
September 26, 2025, 11:57 AM ET
• 4 min read

Justice Clarence Thomas said the Supreme Court should take a more critical approach to settled precedent, saying decided cases are not "the gospel" and suggesting some may have been based on "something somebody dreamt up and others went along with." … Thomas made the comments during a rare public appearance Thursday evening at Catholic University's Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C., just over a week before the high court starts a new term that includes challenges to several major, longstanding decisions.

The Court is poised to revisit Humphrey's Executor v U.S. — a 90-year precedent that limits a president's ability to remove members of some independent federal agencies without cause. The justices will also consider whether to overturn Thornburg v Gingles, a landmark 1986 decision governing the use of race in redistricting under the Voting Rights Act.


Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, left, talks with Professor Jennifer Mascott, right, an affiliated fellow of the Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, at The Catholic University of America's Columbus School of Law, Sept. 25, 2025, in Washington, D.C.
Rod Lamkey/AP

For the first time, the Court is also considering a petition for writ of certiorari asking them to explicitly revisit and overturn the 2015 decision in Obergefell v Hodges, which extended marriage rights to same-sex couples. … "At some point we need to think about what we're doing with stare decisis," Thomas said Thursday, referring to the legal principle of abiding by previous decisions. "And it's not some sort of talismanic deal where you can just say 'stare decisis' and not think, turn off the brain, right?"

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Thomas has long been an outspoken advocate for revisiting some of the Court's significant landmark opinions. In a 2022 concurring opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health — which overturned Roe v Wade — Thomas urged his colleagues to "reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell” — cases involving rights to contraception, same-sex intimacy, and marriage.