New York Times

WASHINGTON — When the Supreme Court returns from its winter break this month, it will hear two minor cases and reach a major anniversary. Unless something very surprising happens during the arguments that day, Justice Clarence Thomas will have gone 10 years without asking a question from the bench.

Maintaining a decade-long vow of silence takes monkish dedication and a certain stamina, and Justice Thomas has no modern competition. It has been at least 45 years since any other member of the court went even a single term without asking a question.

Justice Thomas’s explanations for his disengagement from this aspect of the court’s work have varied, but he seems to have settled on one in recent years. It is simply discourteous, he says, to pepper lawyers with questions.

“I think it’s unnecessary in deciding cases to ask that many questions, and I don’t think it’s helpful,” he said at Harvard Law School in 2013. “I think we should listen to lawyers who are arguing their cases, and I think we should allow the advocates to advocate.”

His is an unusual conception of the role oral arguments play at the Supreme Court. The justices know the lawyers’ arguments well by the time they take the bench, having read stacks of briefs, most of them very thorough.

Oral arguments are a chance for justices to probe the contentions in the briefs and for lawyers to address the issues that most trouble the justices.

“If oral argument provides nothing more than a summary of the brief in monologue, it is of very little value to the court,” Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote in 1987.

Justice Thomas acknowledged at least the premise of this point in his remarks at Harvard. “Most of the work is done in the briefs,” he said.

But he may well be right that his colleagues go too far in the other direction, interrupting one another and spraying lawyers with questions that seldom get full and considered answers.

“We look like ‘Family Feud,’ ” Justice Thomas told a bar group in 2000.

Asked about the free-for-all state of arguments at Harvard in 2013, he said, “I don’t like it that way, but I’m nobody’s boss.”

But the oral arguments are not only about eliciting information from lawyers. They are also the justices’ first opportunity to talk about the case and to try to sway one another.

“Quite often the judges are debating among themselves and just using the lawyers as a backboard,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said in 2008 at Columbia Law School.

Justice Thomas has withdrawn from that debate. Judging by his concurrences and dissents, often joined by no other justice, he is not much interested in compromise, persuasion or coalition building. That is, his admirers say, a sign of character and integrity.

About eight times a year, Justice Thomas does speak from the bench, to announce his majority opinions. Other justices use those occasions to offer conversational summaries partly aimed at visiting tourists, sometimes with humorous asides that do not appear in the printed versions.

Justice Thomas does not seem to relish the task of describing what the court has just decided. In a gruff, rumbling baritone, he reads from a text that is often studded with legal jargon and citations to sub-parts of statutes and regulations.

Three years ago, Justice Thomas did speak up at an argument, but it was not to ask a question. It was to crack a joke. Still, he broke his silence, and it qualified as news.

But there was a problem. The reporters in the courtroom were not sure what he had said.

His comment seemed to concern the qualifications of a defense lawyer in a capital punishment case who had gone to law school at Harvard, like six members of the court. Justice Thomas went to Yale.

“Well — he did not —” Justice Thomas said, according to the initial transcript released by the court. There followed this notation: “(Laughter.)”

Nine days later, the court issued a revised transcript. The new version of the remark was only a little funnier, and only if you like a good death-penalty joke. “Well, there — see, he did not provide good counsel,” Justice Thomas said.

“(Laughter.)”

Justice Thomas’s last question, on Feb. 22, 2006, also came in a death penalty case. He spoke a total of 11 times earlier in that term and in the previous one. They were mostly good questions, brisk and pointed.

Justice Thomas has offered shifting reasons for his general taciturnity. Inhis 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” he wrote that he had never asked questions in college or law school and that he had been intimidated by some of his fellow students.

He has also said he is self-conscious about the way he speaks, partly because he had been teased about the dialect he grew up speaking in rural Georgia.

It is a pity that Justice Thomas has withdrawn from an important part of the court’s work. He has a distinctive legal philosophy and a background entirely different from that of any other justice.

In 2002, the courtroom was riveted when he shared his reflections on the meaning of a Virginia law that banned cross burning, recalling “almost 100 years of lynching” in the South by the Ku Klux Klan and other groups.

“This was a reign of terror, and the cross was a symbol of that reign of terror,” he said, adding, “It was intended to cause fear and to terrorize a population.”

Were Justice Thomas to talk, people would listen.