366
Thomas, J., concurring
as to the forms the State's assistance must take, but we did hold that, at a minimum, States must furnish prisoners "with adequate law libraries or adequate assistance from persons trained in the law." Ibid. Although our cases prior to Bounds occasionally referenced a constitutional right of access to the courts, we had never before recognized a free-standing constitutional right that requires the States to "shoulder affirmative obligations," id., at 824, in order to "insure that inmate access to the courts is adequate, effective, and meaningful," id., at 822.
Recognition of such broad and novel principles of constitutional law are rare enough under our system of law that I would have expected the Bounds Court to explain at length the constitutional basis for the right to state-provided legal materials and legal assistance. But the majority opinion in Bounds failed to identify a single provision of the Constitution to support the right created in that case, a fact that did not go unnoticed in strong dissents by Chief Justice Burger and then-Justice Rehnquist. See id., at 833-834 (opinion of Burger, C. J.) ("The Court leaves us unenlightened as to the source of the 'right of access to the courts' which it perceives or of the requirement that States 'foot the bill' for assuring such access for prisoners who want to act as legal researchers and brief writers"); id., at 840 (opinion of Rehnquist, J.) ("[T]he 'fundamental constitutional right of access to the courts' which the Court announces today is created virtually out of whole cloth with little or no reference to the Constitution from which it is supposed to be derived"). The dissents' calls for an explanation as to which provision of the Constitution guarantees prisoners a right to consult a law library or a legal assistant, however, went unanswered. This is perhaps not surprising: Just three years before Bounds was decided we admitted that the "[t]he precise rationale" for many of the "access to the courts" cases on which Bounds relied had "never been explicitly stated," and that no Clause that had thus far been advanced "by itself provides
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