Served January 1, 2025 through present
Justice Kimberly A. Thomas was elected to a full term on the Michigan Supreme Court in November 2024 and took office on January 1, 2025.
Before joining the Court, Justice Thomas was on the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School for over 20 years. As an experienced trial and appellate litigator, she was co-founder and director of the law school’s Juvenile Justice Clinic and taught students the ethical practice of law. Justice Thomas was honored with a U.S. Fulbright Scholar award in 2017. As a Fulbright, she taught at the University College Cork School of Law in Cork, Ireland.
Among her other professional activities, Justice Thomas served on the bipartisan Michigan Task Force on Juvenile Justice Reform, which took a data-driven approach to understanding and making recommendations for improvement of our state’s juvenile system. Thomas was also engaged as an expert for the Rule of Law Initiative of the American Bar Association, where she worked on law school curriculum development and experiential education in Jordan, Egypt and Turkey. As a legal scholar, Thomas served on the editorial board of the Clinical Law Review.
She started her legal career as a clerk for the Hon. R. Guy Cole Jr., for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and as a staff attorney with the Defender Association of Philadelphia.
Justice Thomas is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Civil Rights – Civil Liberties Law Review. She graduated, magna cum laude, in 1994 from the University of Maryland at College Park with her bachelor’s degree in journalism and economics.
Justice Thomas resides in Washtenaw County with her husband and their two children. She is active in her community, including as a volunteer Science Olympiad coach.