Vice President and Mrs. Cheney, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:

It may be that there are speakers and recipients of awards who need no introduction, but they are nevertheless required to suffer one.

Tonight we do honor to a man who lists his hometown as Pin Point, Georgia. You can believe that if you want to. To me it seems highly dubious. I think it’s a public relations gimmick. Kind of like Honest Abe the rail-splitter. Or Jimmy Carter, the man from Plains. Or, come to think of it, the man from Hope who has recently left us or semi-left us.

Speaking of the man from Hope, there is an interesting contrast between him and our honoree. Both the man from Hope and Hillary were students of mine when I taught at the Yale law school. Well, I no longer say they were my students. I say they were in the room . . . some of the time. By sad contrast, Clarence Thomas never took a course I offered.

Some professors might be sensitive about that, if they lack self-confidence. But I say, let it pass, let it pass.

Why he couldn’t have taken just one measly course, I don’t know. After all I taught three every year. But let it pass.

It’s not as though he didn’t take every other business-related course in the school. But let it pass.

He has never even tried to explain this extraordinary behavior to me. But by now, as you can see, I have forgotten all about it. If he had taken just one course, people would not be calling me a failed professor today. But let it pass, let it pass.

The future Justice Thomas appeared on the steps of the Yale law school fresh from his career as a radical activist at Holy Cross. So that there should be no misunderstanding, he sported an Afro and, if a contemporary witness now also at AEI is to be believed, the student Thomas put up in his study an assortment of flags calculated to offend people of all political persuasions. The truth is that his radicalism was manifestation of a sturdy independence of mind and spirit that refused to accept the slogans and shibboleths of any faction. That spirit has carried him through to today, and to the Justice he has become. Not that he now offends everyone, just the right people. The rest of us love him.

Prior to his nomination to the Supreme Court we heard a great deal about Clarence Thomas’s addiction to natural law. You may recall one of the constitutional savants on the Senate Judiciary Committee trying to set the nominee straight on this topic. He said, of course, Judge Thomas there is good natural law and there is bad natural law. Roughly translated, that means there is liberal natural law and there is conservative natural law.

It turned out that Justice Thomas was having none of it. On the Court he has unwaveringly stuck to the meaning of the Constitution, and has not attempted to read any version of natural law into that document.

In a 1996 case, Justice Thomas wrote:

Strict adherence to this [originalist] approach is essential if we are to fulfill our constitutionally assigned role of giving full effect to the mandate of the Framers without infusing the constitutional fabric with our own political views.

The originalist role that Justice Thomas employs is our only hope of stopping the steady incursion of our courts into the territory that is legitimately not theirs but the legislature’s and the people’s.

The mood in Washington these days is ugly, more bitter even than it was during Richard Nixon’s heyday. And the outcome of the election just passed seems likely to make that spirit worse. There is unfortunately here and across the nation a persistent misunderstanding of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore. It is portrayed as a party-line vote without constitutional substance. The truth is that the decision was perfectly valid. The per curiam opinion joined by five Justices does have major problems. But the concurring opinion by three Justices, Clarence Thomas among them, rests upon solid ground. It is possible to complain that a majority endorsed a new and possibly damaging rationale, but it is not possible to say that the decision was wrong. The rationale offered by the concurring opinion was absolutely correct, and George W. Bush is our legitimate President. As partisan rancor grows and spreads across the nation, I am reminded of Judge Learned Hand’s oft-quoted admonition: "[T]his much I think I do know—that a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save; that in a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon the courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish."

But few people go on to quote the rest of Hand’s warning. Speaking of the temper of moderation and faith in the sacredness of the individual, he said: "If you ask me how such a temper and such faith are bred and fostered, I cannot answer. They are the last flowers of civilization, delicate and easily overrun by the weeds of our sinful human nature; we may even now be witnessing their uprooting and disappearance until in the progress of the ages their seeds can once more find some friendly soil."

Perhaps no court can save us, but with this new administration and judges like Clarence Thomas there is a fighting chance that we can preserve the temper and the faith that Hand identified as the last flowers of civilization.

Please join me in welcoming our honoree, Justice Clarence Thomas.

Robert H. Bork is a senior fellow at AEI.