Clarence Thomas railed against the vaunted U.S. News & World Report law school rankings, saying their domination of the legal world created an unfair class system, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
The Supreme Court associate justice said his clerks, like ones from the GW Law School, also told him about the phrase “third-tier trash” – a derogatory term for aspiring lawyers who studied at schools poorly ranked by U.S. News & World Report.
“Isn’t that the antithesis of what this country is supposed to be about? Isn’t that the bias that we fought about on racial terms, or on terms of sex, or on terms of religion, etc.?” Thomas said at a forum at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law.
He added that while top law firms and justices lean toward hiring students from Ivy League law schools, he had tapped clerks from Creighton, Rutgers, George Mason and GW – with only GW breaking into the the top 20 on the list.
“My new bias, which I now embrace, is that I don’t eliminate the Ivies in hiring, but I intentionally prefer kids from regular backgrounds and regular students,” he added.
Thomas, the most conservative judge on the bench, co-taught a constitutional law seminar at GW last fall and guest lectured in spring 2011.
