That test is mistaken, Justice Thomas argued. “At the founding, ‘search’ did not mean a violation of someone’s reasonable expectation of privacy.” He added, “The word ‘privacy’ does not appear in the Fourth Amendment (or anywhere else in the Constitution for that matter).” He declared that Katz v. United States, the 1967 decision that adopted the test, was a “failed experiment” that “this court is duty bound to reconsider.”

I have saved my favorite Thomas opinion for last: the concurrence in the chief justice’s opinion in the case that upheld Trump’s “Muslim Ban,” Trump v. Hawaii. “Merits aside,” he wrote, “I write separately to address the remedy that the plaintiffs sought and obtained in this case.” The Federal District Court in Hawaii, in an opinion upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, had imposed a nationwide injunction against the ban’s enforcement. “I am skeptical that district courts have the authority to enter universal injunctions,” Justice Thomas wrote. “These injunctions did not emerge until a century and a half after the founding.” They were once rare, he said, “but recently, they have exploded in popularity.” He concluded: “In sum, universal injunctions are legally and historically dubious. If federal courts continue to issue them, this court is duty bound to adjudicate their authority to do so.”

Why do I call this opinion my favorite? Justice Thomas, I’m willing to assume — as I do of all members of the Supreme Court — is a man of high principle. Yet I searched his concurring opinion in vain for a citation to a nationwide injunction issued three years ago by a federal district judge in Texas and upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2016 on a 4-to-4 tie vote. The case was United States v. Texas. The subject was President Barack Obama’s proposed Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program, known as DAPA, granting temporary deferral of deportation to the parents of the young “Dreamers” who had received protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, DACA. The district court not only found in favor of the states that had challenged DAPA but, over the Obama administration’s objections, gave the injunction nationwide scope. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the injunction on a 2-to-1 vote.

In the spring of 2016, Justice Scalia had died and had not yet been replaced. A 4-to-4 tie at the Supreme Court upholds the lower court’s judgment without an opinion and without identifying which justices are on which side. There is no doubt which side Justice Thomas was on. If he had any problem with a nationwide injunction then, he kept that to himself, rather than join the four liberal justices to make a 5-to-3 decision overturning the injunction.

Taken individually, the opinions I’ve discussed here may seem quite technical and rather unremarkable. Taken as a whole, as the work of a single justice during a single Supreme Court term, they paint an extraordinary picture of a judge at war not only with modernity but with the entire project of constitutional law.

Is this the future of the Supreme Court? That’s not my argument. Notably, in nearly all these cases, Justice Thomas spoke only for himself. And I have no reason to suppose that Brett Kavanaugh would follow in these footsteps.

My purpose is simply to take issue with the notion that given the court’s strikingly conservative 2017-18 term, we have already seen the future. That’s far too easy a conclusion from the available evidence. There is a very long game being played here. Young people graduating from law school today have never lived in a world in which Clarence Thomas was not on the Supreme Court. The very fact of his position and his persistence makes opinions that would have been hooted out of the room a few decades ago look respectable in many eyes. In 1997, in Printz v. United States, he was the first modern justice to assert that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to own a gun, and to invite anyone interested to bring the right case to a Supreme Court newly open for Second Amendment business. It took a mere 11 years, and we were handed District of Columbia v. Heller.