"Justice Clarence Thomas, who has not asked a question from the Supreme Court bench since 2006, was expansive and gregarious."

"Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who can appear a little dour during arguments, revealed a lively wit. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she was working to temper a combative questioning style 'that has held me in bad stead.'"

So begins Adam Liptak's NYT article "Three Supreme Court Justices Return to Yale."

Justice Thomas... He acknowledged being a “cynical and negative” law student, blaming immaturity and the unsettled political climate of the early 1970s. “I cannot say we were thinking straight about a lot of things, even if we were not using illegal substances,” he said. “I wish I came here at a time when I could have been more positive.... There is so much here that I walked right by.”...

The justices were questioned by Kate Stith, a law professor at Yale. She asked Justice Alito what he had been reading. “I have two books that are inspirational,” he responded. “I keep them on a table by my bed, and I try to read a little bit of them every night. It’s ‘My Grandfather’s Son’ and ‘My Beloved World.’ ”

Alito is hilarious. There's also this:

Justice Sotomayor cited two reasons for the court’s reluctance to use technology [to communicate with each other]. One was tradition. “The other,” she said of some of her colleagues, “is they don’t know how.”

And the décor is from another era. “We still have spittoons by our seats,” Justice Alito said.

I assumed that was a punchline from Alito, but Liptak signals that it's literally true that there are spittoons. It's still a humorous line, but less funny — less funny of Alito if there really are spittoons,* even though making the observations at that point is a concise, amusing way to say the Court is old-fashioned. And since it's funny if they have spittoons, the sum total of funniness is at least as good as if Alito made it up.

Liptak continues with a Thomas quote, introduced with a Liptak sentence about how to understand the state of mind it reflects:

Justice Thomas said he was content with the way things are. “I like formality,” he said.

I could think of some other ways to interpret those 3 words and don't like being told to think of Justice Thomas as complacent and stiff. A person might like formality without being content with the way things are. A preference for formality can arise out of discomfort and mistrust.** What kind of person shies away from free-wheeling banter and wants things put in writing?

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* There are real spittoons: "Each [Justice] has... a spittoon. The spittoons serve as wastebaskets. The last time a justice used a spittoon for its intended purpose was in the early 20th century."

** There is Critical Race Theory scholarship connecting a preference for formality to race. Citation to come.

ADDED: Here's what I was looking for, Patricia J. Williams, "The Alchemy of Race and Rights," Chapter 8, "The Pain of Word Bondage." Williams describes the willingness of her colleague Peter  to rent an apartment with no written agreement, to hand over a $900 cash deposit to strangers without even getting the keys. She, a black, female law professor, said:

… I was raised to be acutely conscious of the likelihood that no matter what degree of professional I am, people will greet and dismiss my black femaleness as unreliable, untrustworthy, hostile, angry, powerless, irrational, and probably destitute. Futility and despair are very real parts of my response. So it helps me to clarify boundary; to show that I can speak the language of lease is my way of enhancing trust in me in my business affairs. As black, I have been given by this society a strong sense of myself as already too familiar, personal, subordinate to white people. I am still evolving from being treated as three-fifths of a human, a subpart of the white estate. I grew up in a neighborhood where landlords would not sign leases with their poor black tenants, and demanded that the rent be paid in cash; although superficially resembling Peter's transactions, such informality in most white-on-black situations signals distrust, not trust. Unlike Peter, I am still engaged in the struggle to set up transactions at arm's length, as legitimately commercial, and to portray myself as a bargainer of separate worth, distinct power, sufficient rights to manipulate commerce.

Peter, I speculate, would say that a lease or any other formal mechanism would introduce distrust into his relationships and he would suffer alienation, leading to the commodification of his being and the degradation of his person to property. For me, in contrast, the lack of formal relation to the other would leave me estranged. It would risk figurative isolation from that creative commerce by which I may be recognized as whole, by which I may feed and clothe and shelter myself, by which I may be seen as equal — even if I am a stranger. For me, stranger-stranger relations are better than stranger-chattel.