In the Bizzaro constitutional universe inhabited by Thomas, Shakespeare’s England was filled with pistol-packin’ peasants, a notion that most English historians would find bonkers. To describe the Thomas version of the past as a caricature understates the case. Thomas not only treats the case as good legal authority but suggests the author of the most reviled opinion in American law captured the meaning of the Second Amendment better than any other judicial pronouncement in American history. Indeed, it seems appropriate that Thomas saw fit to quote Dred Scott, the court’s worst decision in history, approvingly. It is hard to dispute Breyer’s negative characterization of his colleagues’ tendentious, error-filled, and highly selective culling of evidence to vindicate their gun-rights agenda. Although it has become common, almost routine, for scholars to catalog the embarrassing quality of the current Supreme Court’s uses of history, it is unusual to see a sitting justice level this charge against others on the court in a published opinion. It is particularly noteworthy that Justice Stephen Breyer called out his colleagues for engaging in the most rank form of law-office history in his dissent. Thomas has taken law-office history to a new low, even for the Supreme Court, a body whose special brand of “law chambers history” has prompted multiple critiques and been a source of amusement for generations of scholars and court watchers.

Rather than applying a history, text, and tradition approach, it would be more accurate to characterize Justice Clarence Thomas’ decision as an illustration of the current Supreme Court’s new interpretive model: “Fiction, Fantasy, and Mythology.” Indeed, the distortion of the historical record, misreading of evidence, and dismissal of facts that don’t fit the gun-rights narrative favored by Thomas are genuinely breathtaking in scope. Bruen invokes the authority of history but presents a version of the past that is little more than an ideological fantasy, much of it invented by gun-rights advocates and their libertarian allies in the legal academy with the express purpose of bolstering litigation such as Bruen.

The majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Saul Cornell is the Paul and Diane Guenther chair in American history at Fordham University and adjunct professor of law at Fordham Law School. This article is part of a symposium on the court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v.

The association of personal historians