John G. Roberts (Current Biography, 2006)

Roberts, John G.

Born: January 27, 1955, New York (State)

Sitting in 2003 before the Senate Judiciary Committee, as part of the confirmation hearings for his third nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, John G. Roberts seemed to win over even Democratic senator Edward M. Kennedy with his answer to a question Kennedy put to him about Roberts’s ability to set aside his personal or political views in favor of an open-minded application of legal precedents and the language of particular statutes. “My practice has not been ideological in any sense,” Roberts said, as quoted in the official transcript of the hearings—referring to his more than 13 years of private advocacy, all of which were devoted principally to arguing before the United States Supreme Court and other federal courts. “My clients and their positions are liberal and conservative across the board.” Roberts then alluded to a number of cases he had handled over the years, particularly emphasizing his work for a joint California-Nevada planning board in Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council, Inc. v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (2002) and on behalf of the mining industry in a 2001 case in which he successfully argued that West Virginians who suffered property damage or ill health as a result of mining could not sue for damages. “I would urge you to look at cases on both sides,” Roberts told Kennedy. “Look at the brief, look at the argument where I was arguing the pro environmental position. Take a brief and an argument where I was arguing against environmental enforcement on behalf of a client. See if the professional skills applied, the zealous advocacy is any different in either of those cases. I would respectfully submit that you’ll find that it was not. Now, that’s not judging, I understand that, but it is the same skill, setting aside personal views, taking the precedents and applying them either as an advocate or as a judge.”

Roberts faced similar questions in September 2005, during confirmation hearings before the committee for his nomination by President George W. Bush to the position of chief justice of the United States, more commonly referred to as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Unlike the other eight justices on the court (termed associate justices), the chief justice is vested by the Constitution with presiding over any impeachment trial of the president. In both of Roberts’s Senate confirmation hearings, he generally avoided answering questions intended to draw out his personal views. Instead, he emphasized that, as he said in his opening remarks at the 2005 hearing, a “certain humility should characterize the judicial role.” He added: “Judges and justices are servants of the law, not the other way around. Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.” After both confirmation hearings Roberts went on to receive the approval of the committee by a wide margin (16-3 in 2003 and 13-5 in 2005); he received the approval of the Senate without any expressed dissent on May 8, 2003 and by a vote of 78-22 on September 29, 2005. Within hours of the 2005 vote, Roberts was sworn into office by the court’s most senior associate justice, John Paul Stevens. (Roberts succeeded Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who died on September 3, 2005.) Following his swearing-in ceremony, Roberts noted with pleasure the relatively broad support he had received from the Senate. “I view the vote this morning as confirmation of what for me is a bedrock principle, that judging is different from politics,” Roberts said, in widely reported comments. “And I appreciate the vote very, very much.”

Born in Buffalo, New York, and raised in northwestern Indiana, Roberts spent his early life far from the seat of American governmental power, but virtually all of his adult life has been passed in influential legal posts in the nation’s capital. Immediately after graduating from Harvard Law School, Roberts clerked for two of the 20th century’s most famous jurists, Henry Friendly and William Rehnquist, and he served in two key legal posts under President Ronald Reagan before moving into private practice at the prestigious law firm of Hogan & Hartson. Between his years with Hogan & Hartson and his time working in the Justice Department’s Office of the Solicitor General during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, Roberts argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court and won 25 of them, making him a member of “one of the legal world’s most exclusive clubs: the small community of attorneys who specialize in guiding clients through the upper stratosphere of the federal judiciary,” according to Dan Carney, writing for Business Week (October 9, 2000). Serious, by all accounts, about the responsibilities and limitations of the law, Roberts is also said to be quick-witted and so socially conservative that he decided against attending Stanford Law School after meeting a university representative who wore sandals. A registered Republican, Roberts is considered to be politically conservative as well, though both he and people who know him take pains to emphasize that he is not an ideologue. The law professor Cass Sunstein came to that conclusion when he surveyed Roberts’s work as a jurist in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal (September 5, 2005). To Sunstein Roberts is a judicial minimalist—someone concerned with keeping the judiciary’s role as limited as precedents will allow—rather than a judicial fundamentalist, someone who would overturn any number of Supreme Court decisions so as to restore the federal government to an earlier form, one more closely in keeping with what is thought to be the original scope of the Constitution. “In his two years on the federal bench,” Sunstein wrote, Roberts “has shown none of the bravado and ambition that characterize the fundamentalists. His opinions are meticulous and circumspect. He avoids sweeping pronouncements and bold strokes, and instead pays close attention to the legal material at hand. He is undoubtedly conservative. But ideology has played only a modest role in his judicial work.” Announcing Roberts’s nomination to the Supreme Court on July 19, 2005, President Bush described Roberts in even broader and more glowing terms. “John Roberts has devoted his entire professional life to the cause of justice and is widely admired for his intellect, his sound judgment and his personal decency,” Bush said, in widely quoted comments. “He has the qualities Americans expect in a judge: experience, wisdom, fairness and civility.”

The only boy among John Glover Roberts and Rosemary (Podrasky) Roberts’s four children, John Glover Roberts Jr. was born on January 27, 1955 in Buffalo, New York. His mother was a homemaker and his father an electrical engineer who had moved up through the ranks to become a plant manager with Bethlehem Steel. When Roberts was in elementary school, the company transferred his father to a plant in northwestern Indiana, near Chicago, Illinois, and for the rest of Roberts’s youth, the family lived in the small, relatively affluent village of Long Beach. Roberts finished his education at Catholic schools not far from home, first at the Notre Dame elementary school and later at La Lumiere, then an all-boys’ boarding school. Both institutions were extremely small, and La Lumiere required all students to play three sports so that no team lacked players. Roberts ran track but favored wrestling and later football, playing fullback in his senior year and serving as a co-captain. As a student Roberts excelled at all things verbal; he studied Latin, acted in the drama group, and worked on the school newspaper all four years at La Lumiere, eventually becoming a co-editor.

In 1973 Roberts graduated from La Lumiere at the top of his class of 25 students and began studying at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he entered with sophomore status. A history major, Roberts was by all accounts a driven, sharp-witted, socially conservative, and essentially even-keeled student. Roberts shared a sophomore history prize called the William Scott Ferguson award with another student, and two years later he won the 1976 Bowdoin Prize for Undergraduates, given each year for an outstanding essay on any subject. He also submitted a senior honors thesis on the early 20th-century history of the British Liberal Party. A member of the prestigious honor society Phi Beta Kappa, Roberts graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1976 and entered the university’s law school the same year. Between 1977 and 1979 Roberts worked on the Harvard Law Review, serving as its managing editor during his final year. He earned his juris doctorate in 1979. The stress of achieving the high honor of magna cum laude that accompanied his law degree took a toll, and Roberts—said by an undergraduate friend to have always kept medicine at hand to soothe his perennially upset stomach—ended up in the hospital after graduation, suffering from exhaustion.

Roberts’s first position after Harvard was as a law clerk to a federal judge in New York on the second of the 12 regional courts (termed “circuits”) of the courts of appeals. In the hierarchy of the federal judicial system, the courts of appeals stand between the almost 100 federal trial courts spread throughout the country and the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., and because of its jurisdiction over New York City, the Second Circuit is considered one of the most important of them all. The judge Roberts clerked for, moreover, was Henry Friendly, who is considered possibly the greatest American appeals court judge of the previous century. Roberts’s year-long appointment with Friendly, Evan Thomas and Stuart Taylor Jr. argued in Newsweek (August 1, 2005), left a lasting mark on his approach to the law. Friendly took an open-minded attitude toward each case, Roberts explained in his 2005 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, giving ample room in his written legal opinions to the evidence presented and to the legal precedents that informed his conclusions, even noting cases in which similar precedents could have been chosen and why he selected the ones he did. Thomas and Taylor described Roberts as having followed that approach in the 49 decisions he wrote more than 20 years later, when he served as a federal appeals court judge on the circuit court for Washington, D.C.

In 1980 Roberts finished his appointment with Friendly and moved on to an even more prestigious clerkship, this time with Supreme Court justice William H. Rehnquist. Appointed chief justice in 1986, Rehnquist was at the time of Roberts’s clerkship one of the court’s eight associate justices and was among its most politically conservative members, taking a consistent stand against the desegregation of public schools, for example, and dissenting from the majority opinion in the Supreme Court case that established the unconstitutionality of most laws restricting abortion, Roe v. Wade (1973). Over the following decades Roberts’s early alliance with Rehnquist was used by both supporters and detractors as evidence of his clearly conservative values, but to some people who knew him at the time, Roberts’s conservatism was less a product of his exposure to Rehnquist than of an already established attitude toward the law. John A. Siliciano, a clerk with the liberal Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall during Roberts’s time under Rehnquist and currently the vice provost of the Cornell University Law School, told Adam Liptak and Todd S. Purdum for the New York Times (July 31, 2005), “John’s conservatism was in fact a sign of intellectual courage, coming out of Harvard and being surrounded by law clerks from mainly liberal, East Coast, Ivy League institutions.” Roberts’s work as one of Rehnquist’s three clerks revolved around administrative tasks and legal research, with much of his time given over to assessing the merits of the thousands of petitions sent to the court every year requesting that it hear a case.

In 1981, with Rehnquist’s behind-the-scenes help, Roberts moved from the Supreme Court to the Justice Department for another roughly year-long position: as a special assistant to William French Smith, the attorney general during Reagan’s first term. The following year Roberts moved even closer to the president, serving as an associate counsel to his chief counsel, Fred F. Fielding. Much of Roberts’s work under Fielding was serious but routine—reading laws the president was asked to sign and speeches he planned to give, researching the legalities of proposed presidential decisions, and answering requests for the president’s endorsement of some product or action or for his appearance at an event.

Given the nature of his position, however, some of Roberts’s otherwise routine work had far-reaching implications, both for Reagan and eventually, in his bid to become a Supreme Court justice, for Roberts as well. In one 1985 memo Roberts argued that the U.S. should not be a party to the two 1977 protocols intended to update the Geneva Conventions, the 1949 international agreements governing wartime behavior. Roberts’s “main objection,” according to Jess Bravin and Jeanne Cummings, writing for the Wall Street Journal (August 16, 2005), was that the later protocols “would treat many terrorist organizations as if they were countries engaged in war, legitimizing their activities and offering them protections and courtesies that should not be extended to common criminals.” (The U.S. has yet to ratify either of the 1977 protocols.) Another important memo involved a 1984 district court ruling that called on Washington State to adjust its pay scales for positions usually filled by women so as to compensate for the historical tendency to pay less for jobs associated with women. This approach, called “comparable worth,” differed from the already widely embraced notion of “equal pay for equal work” in that it sought to bring into balance dissimilar jobs—to even out, for example, the pay of such male-dominated positions as construction worker with those of such female-dominated ones as nurse’s aide. “It is difficult to exaggerate the perniciousness of ‘comparable-worth’ theory,” Roberts wrote in a widely quoted memo from 1984. “It mandates nothing less than central planning of the economy by judges.” The slogan of the theory’s supporters, he added, “may as well be, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to her gender.’“ Other memos Roberts wrote during that time which later became controversial included a number addressing racial discrimination and one attacking a 1984 Supreme Court decision that had ruled silent meditation or prayer in public schools unconstitutional. Assessing Roberts’s views in these memos and work he did later for the executive branch, Stuart Taylor Jr. wrote for the Legal Times (September 26, 2005): “Roberts’ interpretations of anti-discrimination laws . . . were sometimes too narrow, in my view. But his positions were both well-reasoned and consistent with his restrained view of judicial power.”

Roberts left the White House in May 1986 to become an associate at Hogan & Hartson, one of Washington, D.C.’s oldest and largest legal firms; under two years later he was made a partner. Both during his first tenure at Hogan & Hartson and in the following decade, when he returned to the firm for a 10-year stint, Roberts’s area of specialization was appellate law—in his case, crafting legal appeals to federal courts, particularly the Supreme Court, and also to some of the district circuit courts. As this was a private practice, Roberts’s work with Hogan & Hartson lacked the partisan political flavor that had previously characterized his work. Even the clear and consistently expressed belief he had as a political appointee in the strength of privilege of the executive branch fell to the side. His most prominent case during his first tenure with the firm served as a check on federal prosecutors’ powers to punish offenders; Roberts argued in United States v. Halper (1989) that Irwin Halper, at one time the manager of a medical laboratory in New York City, had already been punished once in criminal court with a sentence of two years in jail and a $5,000 fine for defrauding the federal Medicare program of $585 and thus could not be punished again in civil court, as he had been by being fined an additional $130,000. The Supreme Court voted unanimously in agreement with Roberts that prosecuting Halper a second time violated the double-jeopardy clause in the Fifth Amendment.

In October 1989 Roberts left Hogan & Hartson to return to the government’s executive branch, becoming the principal deputy solicitor general to Solicitor General Kenneth Starr. Later famous for leading the Office of the Independent Counsel’s investigations into people tied to President Bill Clinton and for laying the groundwork for Clinton’s impeachment in the sex scandal involving the former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Starr was appointed solicitor general by President George H. W. Bush and, like all solicitors general, was primarily charged with arguing on behalf of the federal government in cases before the Supreme Court. The principal deputy solicitor is distinguished from the five other deputy solicitors general by the power of becoming acting solicitor general in cases in which the solicitor general deems it inappropriate to be involved in the case directly; Roberts took on this duty at least four times in no fewer than 16 appearances before the court. The work of the solicitor general and his deputies can also extend beyond arguing cases before the Supreme Court, a point Roberts himself made in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal (May 5, 1993). While most of “what the government’s chief litigator does before the court—defending federal statutes, programs and convictions—generally continues unchanged from one administration to the next,” Roberts wrote, the solicitor general’s office can also present courts with legal arguments—called briefs of amicus curiae or amicus briefs—to support cases that further a particular administration’s political views, even if the U.S. government is not directly involved in the case and even if the case is not being heard (or not yet being heard) in the Supreme Court. The strength of such briefs can be considerable. (Roberts wrote that research suggests “the side, that] the government supports as amicus prevails about 75[percent] of the time.”) Taken altogether, Roberts’s arguments during the slightly over three years he served as principal deputy solicitor general covered a wide range of topics, many of them hinging on technical questions, including what constituted the proper procedures for filing and distributing legal documents (Irwin v. Department of Veterans Affairs, 1990) and whether more than 1,000 specific, local decisions by the Bureau of Land Management could be challenged at once and by an organization that was not directly affected by those decisions (Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation, 1990); others involved similarly abstruse details about finance or tax laws (Grogan v. Garner, 1991; Cottage Savings Association v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 1991; and United States v. Centennial Savings Bank, 1991). Only a few touched on more sensitive areas, such as the government’s ability to force the sale of land needed for public use (National Railroad Passenger Corporation v. Boston & Maine Corporation, 1992), prisoners’ rights (Hudson v. McMillian, 1991, Helling v. McKinney, 1993, and Withrow v. Williams, 1993), the limits placed on the police in search-and-seizure activities (Florida v. Jimeno, 1991), affirmative action (Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission, 1990), and, the most divisive judicial issue of all, abortion (Bray v. Alexandria Clinic, 1993). It should be noted, though, that in the case of Bray v. Alexandria Clinic the questions put to the court were about protesting abortion rather than abortion per se. Similarly, another important case that Roberts participated in that involved abortion was not directly related to the freedoms granted by Roe v. Wade. Called Rust v. Sullivan (1991), the case questioned regulations laid out by Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan that forbade the use of federal funds to support abortion, with “support” being defined to include telling women the names of clinics that perform abortions. While it was Starr who argued the case before the Supreme Court, Roberts co-authored the brief submitted on the government’s behalf, and one sentence in that brief later became a lightning rod for pro-choice activism against Roberts’s many nominations to the bench: “We continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled.” The court never responded to that part of the government’s argument, though it decided by one vote (5-4) in favor of the government’s overall position that Sullivan’s regulations had not violated the First or Fifth Amendment.

In January 1992, while still working for the Office of the Solicitor General, Roberts was nominated to fill a position on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit formerly held by current Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. Like dozens of other judicial nominations put forward by the first Bush administration, however, Roberts’s nomination lingered untouched throughout the rest of the year, the victim of the Democrats’ desire to put off confirming nominees until after the 1992 presidential elections. When Bill Clinton won in November, Roberts’s chances evaporated. In their article in Newsweek, Thomas and Taylor pointed to that development as Roberts’s “lowest moment” and reported that “friends say he was crestfallen.” Publicly, Roberts never missed a beat; his return to Hogan & Hartson to direct its appellate law practice was announced in January 1993, even before he had argued his last case before the court as principal deputy solicitor general.

Over his next 10 years at Hogan & Hartson, Roberts amassed both an impressive record of appearances before the Supreme Court and a small fortune, earning more than $1 million during the final year of his private practice. The range of cases he argued during that phase of his career covered everything from patent law (TrafFix Devices, Inc. v. Marketing Displays, Inc., 2000) to state policies governing the behavior of sexual offenders (Smith v. Doe, 2003), with only one clear trend: Roberts tended to represent large, well-established groups—businesses, universities, industry-wide organizations, or state or local governments—rather than individuals, unions, or political groups of any stripe. One reason for that may have been his experience advocating for the federal government in the Solicitor General’s Office; another may have been the extremely high fees of Hogan & Hartson, which in at least one instance ran to $500,000 to argue a single case before the Supreme Court, a charge that put his expertise far beyond the reach of most private individuals. In this phase of his private practice, Roberts showed a particularly strong tendency to represent the interests of manufacturers, especially mining corporations, in suits directly or indirectly related to workers’ rights, a tendency that also put him on the losing side on a relatively high number of occasions. In United Mineworkers of America v. Bagwell (1994), Roberts argued on behalf of the state of Virginia’s attempt to recover more than $64 million in fines from a miners’ union; the attempt failed when the Supreme Court decided that the decision to award the fines had been reached unfairly. In 2000 Roberts argued in Eastern Associated Coal Corp. v. United Mine Workers of America that a mining company had the right to fire an employee who had twice tested positive for marijuana use, despite a private arbitration decision that reinstated the employee; the Supreme Court again decided against Roberts’s clients. Roberts met the same fate in Barnhart v. Peabody Coal Co. (2003), when the Supreme Court sided against the coal company in a suit involving the Coal Industry Retiree Health Benefit Act of 1992, with much of the case hinging on the interpretation of a single word: “shall.” A year earlier, however, Roberts enjoyed an important victory, one with far-reaching implications for the interpretation of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), when the Supreme Court voted unanimously in support of Roberts’s client, the car company Toyota, in its suit against a former employee, Ella Williams. Williams had been fired from Toyota after developing carpal tunnel syndrome and had claimed that the company acted negligently by not making the accommodations for her disability required by the ADA.

Roberts’s success with Toyota Motor Manufacturing v. Williams was more characteristic of his record in private practice than his handful of losses against mining workers. Indeed, Roberts was extraordinarily successful in his appearances before the Supreme Court, winning 25 of the 39 cases he argued—a figure that combines his private practice with his time in the Solicitor General’s Office and that made him, as Adam Liptak wrote for the New York Times (July 20, 2005), “one of the great Supreme Court advocates of his generation.” Among the most important cases that Roberts won for Hogan & Hartson were two in which he represented the state of Alaska. The first case was Alaska v. Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government (1998), which revolved around whether the state or a village of Neets’aii Gwich’in people—one of Alaska’s many Native American groups—had the right to impose taxes on business conducted on its land. The Supreme Court decided that it was the state’s right since the land occupied by the village of Venetie no longer qualified as “Indian country” after a 1971 federal law eliminated all but one of Alaska’s Native American reservations. A second victory for the state of Alaska came five years later, with Smith v. Doe (2003), in which Roberts successfully argued that an act requiring sex offenders to register with the state could be applied to people who had been convicted of sexual offenses before the act became effective, in August 1994. But perhaps the most widely discussed case of Roberts’s private-practice career was NCAA v. Smith, in 1999. Representing the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Roberts took the position that the NCAA was not subject to the gender equity requirements set forth in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 because it did not directly receive the federal funding from which it admittedly benefited from by virtue of its intimate ties to American colleges and universities. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed.

In November 2000, while still at Hogan & Hartson, Roberts went to Florida to support the campaign of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney when that year’s election results were in dispute. In 2001, when Bush became the first Republican president in eight years, he immediately nominated Roberts to fill an open position on the Washington, D.C., federal circuit court—the same position Bush’s father had hoped Roberts would fill. Though buoyed by a letter from a bipartisan group of 150 lawyers offering Roberts unqualified praise, he was an object of particular opposition by groups seeking to ensure that Roe v. Wade remain in place, as Roberts’s record on abortion did not suggest he supported it. For two years Roberts and 29 other nominees languished, not even offered the opportunity to air their views in hearings in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In 2003, however, Roberts received a third nomination, and this time, with a clear Republican majority in place in the Senate, Roberts was given the spot he had first been offered over a decade earlier.

Roberts’s appointment began on June 2, 2003, and over the next two years, he heard scores of cases but wrote opinions on only 49, dissenting only three times from the other judges who heard the same cases. Out of all his work on the court, three cases in particular were frequently mentioned during his nomination hearings in 2005. The first came in 2003, when the court was asked in Rancho Viejo, LLC v. Norton to decide whether the Department of the Interior had the right under the Endangered Species Act to regulate development that might harm the arroyo southwestern toad, a species found only in California. When the standard three-judge panel found that the Department of the Interior did have that power, the circuit court was asked to consider the case en banc—that is, to consider it before the whole court, a move that would necessarily bring a wider array of opinions. On July 22, 2003 the court rejected the petition for an en banc hearing, and Roberts authored one of two dissents. He argued that hearing the case before the full court was justified by the misapplication of certain Supreme Court precedents by the smaller panel of judges; he also seemed to doubt that the federal government had the power to protect what he called “a hapless toad that, for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California,” and thus cannot be protected under the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce. (The Supreme Court refused to hear the case in 2004.) The second case seized on by Roberts’s critics centered on a 12-year-old girl who in October 2000 was caught eating a single french fry in a Washington, D.C., subway station. Because the city’s laws did not allow for a minor to be simply fined for the offense, the child was handcuffed and searched and had her shoelaces removed before she was taken to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and held for nearly three hours prior to her release. In the opinion of the child’s mother, the police’s extreme response violated her daughter’s constitutional rights, but to the district court that first heard the case, and to Roberts and the other members on the circuit court panel that reviewed it, the city’s law might indeed have been a “bad idea” but did not violate the girl’s rights. The final case, decided after Roberts’s initial contact with Bush about the Supreme Court position but several days before his nomination, was called Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2005) and concerned a man, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who in 2001 was captured by Afghani military forces and accused of having been the driver for terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. The government tried Hamdan for his terrorist activities under a system of military tribunals, as he was what it termed an “enemy combatant”; Hamdan and his supporters, however, petitioned for a full jury trial in American courts. Roberts and the other two judges who heard the case refused to grant Hamdan his petition, and the continued detention ordered by the military trial was allowed to stand.

On July 19, 2005 Bush nominated Roberts to fill a spot that had just been vacated by the politically moderate associate justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who on July 1 had announced her decision to retire. Responses to Roberts’s nomination from conservatives were swift and generally emphatic in their support, while liberal responses varied from cautious approval to forceful denunciations. To most political observers, though, Roberts’s nomination seemed assured almost from the beginning—barring unexpected revelations about his past during his hearings in the Senate. Only one surprise emerged, and it came just before those hearings were set to begin: on September 3, 2005 Rehnquist died of thyroid cancer. Three days later Bush withdrew Roberts’s first nomination and recommended him instead for Rehnquist’s spot. The hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee lasted from September 12 to 15, and in the views of most observers, Roberts sailed through them, little troubled by the persistent questions from Democrats about his opinions, especially on abortion. As Democratic senator Charles Schumer told Roberts on the last day of the hearings: “Your knowledge of law and the way you present it is a tour de force. You may very well possess the most powerful intellect of any person to come before the Senate for this position.” Two weeks later, before the full Senate, Schumer nonetheless joined 22 of his Democratic colleagues in voting against Roberts. The remaining 22 Democrats voted to support him, while all 55 Republican senators and the one independent did as well.

Before the start of the 2005-06 session, many observers expected to see more divisiveness among the members of the Roberts Supreme Court than had existed under Chief Justice Rehnquist, but, as Jeffery Rosen wrote for Time (July 10, 2006), “the Roberts court is, at least so far, less fractured than the court led for 19 years by William Rehnquist. Almost half its decisions this year had no dissents, compared with 38[percent] in Rehnquist’s final term, and the tally of 16 cases decided by a 5-to-4 vote is seven fewer than under Rehnquist. That is a tribute to the personality and leadership skills of Roberts, who has made issuing strong decisions and encouraging collegial debate top priorities.” Rosen added that in a speech that Roberts gave during the graduation ceremony held in May at Georgetown University Law Center, he stated that he hoped that upcoming Supreme Court rulings would be decided unanimously or nearly so, so as to promote “clarity and guidance for lawyers and lower courts trying to figure out what Justices meant.”

Roberts lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with his wife, Jane Marie Sullivan Roberts, a fellow attorney. They married in July 1996 and have two adopted children, Josephine (known as Josie), who was five at the time that Roberts’s nomination was announced in 2005, and John (known as Jack), who was four.

Suggested Reading: Federal Judiciary Web site; FindLaw Web site; Harvard Crimson (on-line) July 19, 2005; Indianapolis Star (on-line) July 20, 2005; New York Times A p1 July 22, 2005; Newsweek Aug. 1, 2005, with photos; Oyez Project Web site; Time p26 July 10, 2006; U.S. News & World Report p32+ Oct. 2, 2006; U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Web site; U.S. Supreme Court Web site; USA Today (on-line) July 20, 2005; Weekly Standard (on-line) Aug. 8, 2005

Citation:

Original source: Current Biography (Bio Ref Bank)

Original publication date: 2006

Original publication type: Print

Publisher of original publication: The H. W. Wilson Company

Database publisher: The H.W. Wilson Company

Database: Biography Reference Bank

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Source: Current Biography (Bio Ref Bank), 02/01/2006

Accession Number: 202986240

John G. Roberts (Current Biography, 2006)