Thomas was eventually confirmed by a narrow margin, but the experience left him embittered. (“Whoop-dee-damn doo,” he wrote about the vote in his searing memoir, My Grandfather’s Son.) Soon after, he told his clerks he would remain faithful to his conservative principles. “I ain’t evolving!” he would say.

But whether made by a lover or a jurist, that oath—I will always feel this way—is always eventually broken. Time and chance happen to us all. Thomas does seem to be evolving.

One important sign of change was his visit last fall to his alma mater, Yale Law School. Thomas has always scorned his Yale education, and once put a 15-cent sticker on his diploma to indicate its worthlessness to him. But in October, in a rare moment of public self-examination, he took responsibility for the bad time he had at Yale: “I wish that I came here at a time when I could have been more positive because there was so much here that I walked right by, that I closed my eyes and my heart to,” he told an audience there.

If Thomas is “evolving,” though, that doesn’t likely mean “becoming less conservative.” Far from it; no matter how long he serves, Thomas will probably leave the Court with the most conservative record in its history. But he has always marched to the beat of his own conservative drum, and lately the rhythms of that drum have become more distinct.

This term, Thomas was the author of 36 opinions—counting, that is, all his majority opinions, concurrences, and dissents. Of those 36, 18—fully half—were dissents, some written with others and others written only for himself. The total number of opinions is a personal best, and makes him number one for the term by a long shot. And it doesn’t even count his separate opinions dissenting from the Court’s orders denying cert or refusing stays in lower-court cases. Thomas hasn’t written this much in over a decade.

Some of his dissents were joined by other justices; even those sometimes had a strange tone about them. In Brumfield v. McCain, the petitioner, a death-penalty defendant, argued that the lower court used deficient procedures to determine whether he was intellectually disabled. Thomas’s opinion wandered into a discussion of the murder victim’s son’s National Football League career. The oddness of that passage spurred two of his fellow dissenters to step away from that part of the opinion. “The story . . . is inspiring and will serve a very beneficial purpose if widely read,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a one-paragraph separate dissent joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, “but I do not want to suggest that it is essential to the legal analysis in this case.”

Even stranger are Thomas’s solo dissents. The other eight justices, taking their cue from the lawyers, often debate the meaning of the Court’s precedents. Thomas seems to find little profit in that; instead, he often suggests that the question will be easy if the Court simply overturns a century or so of precedent.