John Roberts in the United States
Introduction to John Roberts
John Glover Roberts, Jr., born in 1955, the 17th chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Roberts, an appointee of President George W. Bush, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in September 2005 as the successor to the late William H. Rehnquist. Roberts became the youngest chief justice since John Marshall.
Roberts was born in Buffalo, New York, on January 27, 1955. He grew up in Indiana. In 1976 he received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He then attended Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1979. Roberts served as a law clerk to a U.S. court of appeals judge from 1979 to 1980 and to Supreme Court justice Rehnquist from 1980 to 1981. (Rehnquist became chief justice in 1986.) Roberts was admitted to the bar in 1981.
From 1982 to 1986 Roberts worked in the administration of President Ronald Reagan. He served as special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith in the U.S. Department of Justice until 1982 and then as an associate counsel to the president under White House counsel Fred Fielding. Roberts practiced law at a private firm, Hogan & Hartson, in Washington, D.C., from 1986 to 1989 and again from 1993 to 2003. In the interim years of 1989 to 1993, he served in the administration of President George H. W. Bush as principal deputy solicitor general of the Department of Justice. In that role he helped formulate the administration’s position in Supreme Court cases. In 1990, for example, Roberts argued in favor of a government regulation that banned federally funded family-planning programs from providing abortion-related counseling.
In 2003 President George W. Bush appointed Roberts to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In July 2005 Bush nominated Roberts to succeed Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Following Rehnquist’s death in early September, however, Bush upgraded his nomination of Roberts to chief justice.
During Roberts’s confirmation hearings, Democratic senators tried to draw out his opinions on controversial issues such as affirmative action, abortion, and privacy rights. However, Roberts repeatedly refused to state his personal views or comment on past rulings on those topics. Roberts’s association with the conservative legal group known as the Federalist Society also drew inquiries, but Roberts insisted that he was not an “ideologue.” He also pointedly disagreed with the narrow “originalist” approach to the Constitution of the United States held by justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Roberts indicated he believes the Constitution is a living document, saying the original framers intended it to “apply to changing conditions.”
Overall, however, he followed a confirmation strategy that had served past Supreme Court nominees well, sidestepping potentially controversial answers by simply stating he would respect and uphold legal precedent. Roberts was approved by a 13-5 vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee and by a 78-22 vote in the U.S. Senate. He was sworn in on September 29, 2005, just in time for the first session of the Supreme Court’s 2005-2006 term.” (1)
John Roberts, Supreme Court Justice and Lawyer
Bay Douglas W. Kmiec, former US Ambassador to Malta. He is the Caruso Family Chair in Constitutional Law and Human Rights at Pepperdine University law school.
Some of my conservative friends claim that the Roberts Court is more political than legal, but I suspect that’s only because they are legally disappointed – after the Chief’s rescue of Obamacare – to reap all the legal dividends they expected from the political seal of approval given John Roberts by the Federalist Society – known to have a few policy views casting large originalism shadows on the law, itself.
In fairness to the Chief Justice, he turns out to be just what the legal ideological societies don’t like — an open-minded jurist, capable of discerning wisdom in more than one direction, and beyond the narrow confines of the meaning of words in 1789. John Roberts is neither liberal nor conservative in whole; rather, he steadfastly remains his umpire metaphor. The Chief Justice has a continuing desire to be a minimalist in the Rehnquist mold, and on occasion this means he indulges (as did Rehnquist) theories that are capable of unifying the Court in somewhat unusual ways. After the oral arguments in the same sex cases, I was convinced that the Chief was searching for another Obamacare surprise – that is, where in the process of articulating conservative limits to the commerce and spending powers, which had eluded the legal right for decades, he sustains an historic expansion of federal power over matters of health.
Neat maneuver, but is something like that available to the Chief Justice in the same sex cases? For a while I thought the Chief was tempted to revive privileges and immunities finding Prop. 8 to be invalid as drawing an irrational classification with respect to a fundamental interest. The Court had done something like that in several obscure cases (Saenz; Shapiro) touching upon invidious distinctions among state residents with respect to welfare and other social benefits. Can’t draw crooked lines among one’s own residents even if some lines can be drawn differently between insiders and outsiders. Will the Chief Justice do this? I doubt anyone actually thinks so, except perhaps Justice Thomas who has been a big fan of reviving privileges and immunities.
This would confuse the progressives long enough to allow the conservatives to walk away with a revived privileges and immunities clause, while of course, giving victory to the challengers of Prop. 8. A state, it might be said, can no more selectively give increased welfare to some state residents over others than the state can deny marriage to some but not others resident in your state. Nevertheless, were the Chief Justice to go this route, it would be a split-the-baby result, like Obamacare – where the Chief pulled the spending power out of from behind his “umpirial” chest protector to save health care from the rare limits of the commerce power. (…)
The Chief Justice wondered out loud at the oral argument why Imperial County – the party sufficiently adverse to Prop. 8 under federal law was not permitted to go forward. Anyone familiar with the Chief Justice knows he is a stickler on a proper conception of the separation of powers, and for this reason, the Chief won’t casually just accept the state court view that its mechanism of allowing proponents to pick up the case when public officials give it up is sufficiently adverse; this is an Article III federal, constitutional question, not a state one.
Resources
Notes and References
- Information about John Roberts in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia
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