New Utah justice has bond with U.S. justice

Today, when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Thomas R. Lee face each other with right arms raised, the former will swear in the latter to the Utah Supreme Court.

In person and on paper, the two men couldn't be more different.

A receding gray hairline caps Thomas' dark brown face. He is shorter than most men, even though at 62 years old vestiges of a powerful build remain hewn to his frame. His father abandoned him before he turned 2 years old; his lone surviving sibling lives in rural Georgia and soaks up hours of daytime television each and every weekday.

In stark contrast, Lee looks like central casting's version of a Nordic god: tall, pale, lean and angular. His father, Rex E. Lee, blazed a trail to the pinnacle of prominence and lawyerly notoriety as the founding dean of BYU's J. Reuben Clark Law School, solicitor general of the United States during the Reagan administration and the 10th president of BYU. Lee's brother, Mike Lee, can often be found pounding the pavement out on the campaign trail as the heavy favorite to be Utah's next U.S. senator.

And yet, despite all their differences, Justice Thomas and soon-to-be Justice Lee share such a close bond that they're practically family.

The story of Thomas and Lee began back in 1993. Lee was two years removed from law school at the University of Chicago, and Thomas summoned Lee to his chambers for a one-on-one interview to determine if Lee would be one of the four clerks Thomas hired for the 1994-95 Supreme Court term.

"I was immediately drawn to (Thomas) as the warm, generous, kind, fun-loving, wonderful person that I now know him to be," Lee recalled. "I just felt like I developed an immediate connection with him. … From the hour or so I spent with him in his chambers at the Supreme Court, (my) desire (and) longing to clerk for him was magnified tenfold.

"I knew not only that it would be a professionally enriching opportunity, but that this was someone who I admired personally and that I would really enjoy spending time with."

As Thomas pointed out, the location of that 1993 meeting held special significance for Lee. Following the retirement of Justice Byron White from the Supreme Court earlier that year, Thomas had recently moved into the former chambers of White — the same justice for whom Lee's father served a Supreme Court clerkship in the 1960s.