Cite as: 518 U. S. 343 (1996)
Thomas, J., concurring
Our transcript and fee cases were, therefore, limited holdings rooted in principles of equal protection. In Bounds, these cases were recharacterized almost beyond recognition, as the Court created a new and different right on behalf of prisoners—a right to have the State pay for law libraries or other forms of legal assistance without regard to the equality of access. Only by divorcing our prior holdings from their reasoning, and by elevating dicta over constitutional principle, was the Court able to reach such a result.
The unjustified transformation of the right to nondiscriminatory access to the courts into the broader, untethered right to legal assistance generally would be reason enough for me to conclude that Bounds was wrongly decided. However, even assuming that Bounds properly relied upon the Griffin line of cases for the proposition for which those cases actually stood, the Bounds Court failed to address a significant intervening development in our jurisprudence: the fact that the equal protection theory underlying Griffin and its progeny had largely been abandoned prior to Bounds. The provisions invalidated in our transcript and fee cases were all facially neutral administrative regulations that had a disparate impact on the poor; there is no indication in any of those cases that the State imposed the challenged fee with the purpose of deliberately discriminating against indigent defendants. See, e. g., Douglas, supra, at 361 (Harlan, J., dissenting) (criticizing the Court for invalidating a state law "of general applicability" solely because it "may affect the poor more harshly than it does the rich"). In the years between Douglas and Bounds, however, we rejected a disparate-impact theory of the Equal Protection Clause. That the doctrinal basis for Griffin and its progeny has largely been undermined—and in fact had been before Bounds was decided—confirms the invalidity of the right to law libraries and legal assistance created in Bounds.
We first cast doubt on the proposition that a facially neutral law violates the Equal Protection Clause solely because
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