John Roberts

Health

In 2007, Roberts had a seizure at his vacation home in St. George, Maine, and stayed overnight at a hospital in Rockport, Maine; doctors found no identifiable cause. Roberts had suffered a similar seizure in 1993 but an official Supreme Court statement said that a neurological evaluation "revealed no cause for concern." Federal judges are not required by law to release information about their health.

On June 21, 2020, Roberts fell at a Maryland country club; his forehead required sutures and he stayed overnight in the hospital for observation. Doctors ruled out a seizure and believed dehydration had made Roberts light-headed.

U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit

When George W. Bush won the contested 2000 presidential election, journalists speculated about whom he might consider as possible nominees for the Supreme Court. Luttig, Wilkinson, and other Reagan officials were leading candidates, but Judge Alberto Gonzales of the Texas Supreme Court, a close supporter of Bush, also emerged and had a chance to be the first Latino nominee. Roberts, who had not worked in government while Bill Clinton was in office, did not appear on lists compiled by Bush supporters, advocacy groups, or the media, but nonetheless remained a strong candidate for a Republican nomination and was poised to be re-nominated to the D.C. Circuit, which is often a platform for Supreme Court nomination.

On May 9, 2001, Bush nominated Roberts to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to replace Judge James L. Buckley, who had retired. Unlike in 1992 when his first nomination stalled in the Democratic-majority Senate, Roberts's nomination came when Republicans had secured a one-vote Senate majority. But it soon lost that majority when Senator Jim Jeffords left the party to become an independent, jeopardizing Roberts's candidacy, which stalled once again when Senate Democrats refused to hold any nomination hearings. In 2002, Republicans regained control of the Senate and Roberts finally received a hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Supported by a bipartisan letter of support signed by more than 150 members of the District of Columbia Bar—including White House counsels Lloyd Cutler, C. Boyden Gray, and Solicitor General Seth Waxman—the Judiciary Committee recommended Roberts by a vote of 16 to 3, and the Senate confirmed him unanimously by voice vote on May 8, 2003. On June 2, he received his judicial commission. Even when Roberts had not yet fully assumed his role as a circuit judge, White House Counsel officers listed him on their shortlist of Supreme Court candidates.

Roberts authored 49 opinions during his two-year service on the D.C. Circuit, many of which concerned decisions by the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. According to biographer Joan Biskupic, his opinions often employed a "characteristically crisp, clear writing style" that favored the use of imagery and idioms. Most of the disputes he reviewed concerned government regulation, union rights, and collective bargaining, but he also wrote on environmental law, criminal law, and procedural matters. One case, Hedgepeth ex rel. Hedgepeth v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit (2004), garnered media attention when Roberts found that Washington police properly detained a 12-year-old girl who ate in violation of a zero tolerance policy against eating in a metro station. His opinions generally reflected a conservative judicial philosophy, including in areas of civil rights and executive power.

Nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States (2005)

By the time of the 2004 presidential election, Justice Rehnquist was terminally ill, and senior Bush administration advisors under Karl Rove began assessing potential candidates to replace him. Among them, Roberts stood out for his experience as a Supreme Court advocate, which had brought him the favorable attention of not just conservatives but also liberals such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

On July 19, 2005, President Bush nominated Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court to fill a vacancy to be created by the impending retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Roberts's nomination was the first Supreme Court nomination since Stephen Breyer's in 1994. On September 3, 2005, while Roberts's confirmation was pending before the Senate, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died. Two days later, Bush withdrew Roberts's nomination as O'Connor's successor and nominated Roberts to succeed Rehnquist as chief justice.

Roberts's testimony on his jurisprudence

During his confirmation hearings, Roberts said he did not have a comprehensive jurisprudential philosophy and did "not think beginning with an all-encompassing approach to constitutional interpretation is the best way to faithfully construe the document." Roberts compared judges to baseball umpires: "[I]t's my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat." Among the issues he discussed during the hearings were:

Commerce Clause

In Senate hearings, Roberts said:

Starting with McCulloch v. Maryland, Chief Justice John Marshall gave a very broad and expansive reading to the powers of the federal government and explained generally that if the ends be legitimate, then any means chosen to achieve them are within the power of the federal government, and cases interpreting that, throughout the years, have come down. Certainly, by the time Lopez was decided, many of us had learned in law school that it was just sort of a formality to say that interstate commerce was affected and that cases weren't going to be thrown out that way. Lopez certainly breathed new life into the Commerce Clause.

I think it remains to be seen, in subsequent decisions, how rigorous a showing, and in many cases, it is just a showing. It's not a question of an abstract fact—does this affect interstate commerce or not—but has this body, the Congress, demonstrated the impact on interstate commerce that drove them to legislate? That's a very important factor. It wasn't present in Lopez at all. I think the members of Congress had heard the same thing I had heard in law school, that this is unimportant—and they hadn't gone through the process of establishing a record in that case.

Federalism

Roberts said the following about federalism in a 1999 radio interview:

We have gotten to the point these days where we think the only way we can show we're serious about a problem is if we pass a federal law, whether it is the Violence Against Women Act or anything else. The fact of the matter is conditions are different in different states, and state laws can be more—relevant is I think exactly the right term, more attuned to the different situations in New York, as opposed to Minnesota, and that is what the federal system is based on.

Reviewing Acts of Congress

At a Senate hearing, Roberts said:

The Supreme Court has, throughout its history, on many occasions described the deference that is due to legislative judgments. Justice Holmes described assessing the constitutionality of an act of Congress as the gravest duty that the Supreme Court is called upon to perform.... It's a principle that is easily stated and needs to be observed in practice, as well as in theory.

Now, the Court, of course, has the obligation, and has been recognized since Marbury v. Madison, to assess the constitutionality of acts of Congress, and when those acts are challenged, it is the obligation of the Court to say what the law is. The determination of when deference to legislative policy judgments goes too far and becomes abdication of the judicial responsibility, and when scrutiny of those judgments goes too far on the part of the judges and becomes what I think is properly called judicial activism—that is certainly the central dilemma of having an unelected, as you describe it correctly, undemocratic judiciary in a democratic republic.

Stare decisis

On the subject of stare decisis, referring to Brown v. Board of Education, the decision overturning school segregation, Roberts said: "the Court in that case, of course, overruled a prior decision. I don't think that constitutes judicial activism because obviously if the decision is wrong, it should be overruled. That's not activism. That's applying the law correctly."

Roe v. Wade

As a lawyer for the Reagan administration, Roberts wrote legal memos defending administration policies on abortion. At his nomination hearing, he testified that the legal memos represented the views of the administration he was representing at the time and not necessarily his own. "I was a staff lawyer; I didn't have a position," Roberts said. As a lawyer in the George H. W. Bush administration, Roberts signed a legal brief urging the court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

In private meetings with senators before his confirmation, Roberts testified that Roe was settled law, but added that it was subject to the legal principle of stare decisis, meaning that while the Court must give some weight to the precedent, it was not legally bound to uphold it.

In his Senate testimony, Roberts said that, while sitting on the Appellate Court, he had an obligation to respect precedents established by the Supreme Court, including the right to abortion. He said: "Roe v. Wade is the settled law of the land.... There is nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent, as well as Casey." Following nominees' traditional reluctance to indicate which way they might vote on an issue likely to come before the Supreme Court, he did not explicitly say whether he would vote to overturn either. Jeffrey Rosen said, "I wouldn't bet on Chief Justice Roberts's siding unequivocally with the anti-Roe forces."

Confirmation

On September 22, 2005, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Roberts's nomination by a vote of 13–5, with senators Ted Kennedy, Richard Durbin, Charles Schumer, Joe Biden, and Dianne Feinstein opposed. The full Senate confirmed Roberts on September 29 by a margin of 78–22. All Republicans and the one independent voted for Roberts; the Democrats split evenly, 22–22. Roberts was confirmed by what was, historically, a narrow margin for a Supreme Court justice, but all subsequent confirmation votes have been even narrower.

U.S. Supreme Court

Roberts took the constitutional oath of office, administered by Associate Justice John Paul Stevens at the White House, on September 29, 2005. On October 3, he took the judicial oath provided for by the Judiciary Act of 1789 at the United States Supreme Court building.

Justice Antonin Scalia said that Roberts "pretty much run[s] the show the same way" as Rehnquist, albeit "let[ting] people go on a little longer at conference... but [he'll] get over that." Analysts such as Jeffrey Toobin have portrayed Roberts as a consistent advocate for conservative principles. Garrett Epps called Roberts's prose "crystalline, vivid, and often humorous."

Seventh Circuit judge Diane Sykes, surveying Roberts's first term on the Court, concluded that his jurisprudence "appears to be strongly rooted in the discipline of traditional legal method, evincing a fidelity to text, structure, history, and the constitutional hierarchy. He exhibits the restraint that flows from the careful application of established decisional rules and the practice of reasoning from the case law. He appears to place great stock in the process-oriented tools and doctrinal rules that guard against the aggregation of judicial power and keep judicial discretion in check: jurisdictional limits, structural federalism, textualism, and the procedural rules that govern the scope of judicial review." Roberts has been said to operate under an approach of judicial minimalism in his decisions, having said, "[i]f it is not necessary to decide more to a case, then in my view it is necessary not to decide more to a case." His decision-making and leadership seems to demonstrate an intention to preserve the Court's power and legitimacy while maintaining judicial independence.

In November 2018, the Associated Press approached Roberts for comment after President Donald Trump called a jurist who ruled against his asylum policy an "Obama judge." Roberts responded: "We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them." His remarks were widely interpreted as a rebuke of Trump's comment. As Chief Justice, Roberts presided over the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, which began on January 16 and ended on February 5, 2020. Roberts did not preside over Trump's second impeachment trial, believing that the Constitution requires only that the chief justice preside in the trial of a sitting president, not of a former president.

Although Roberts's judicial philosophy is considered conservative, he is seen as more moderate than his predecessor, William Rehnquist, particularly when Rehnquist's vote in Bush v. Gore is compared to Roberts's vote in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius: his decision to uphold the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) caused the press to contrast his Court with the Rehnquist Court. Roberts's judicial philosophy is also seen as more moderate and conciliatory than those of Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas. He seems to want more consensus from the Court. At the beginning of his tenure, Roberts's voting pattern closely aligned with that of Samuel Alito, but in recent years, his voting pattern has resembled that of Brett Kavanaugh, who is generally seen as more moderate than Alito.

After the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, several commentators wrote that Roberts was no longer the leading justice. As the five other conservative justices could outvote the rest, he supposedly could no longer preside over a moderately conservative course while respecting precedent. This view was espoused again after the 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Presidential power

On June 26, 2018, Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Trump v. Hawaii, upholding the Trump administration's travel ban against seven nations, five of which had a Muslim majority. In his opinion, Roberts concluded that 8 U. S. C. §1182(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act gives the president broad authority to suspend the entry of non-citizens into the country and that Presidential Proclamation 9645 did not exceed the limitations of said act. Additionally, Roberts wrote that the proclamation and its travel ban did not violate the Free Exercise Clause, as Trump's statements in support of the ban could be justified on the basis of national security.

On July 9, 2020, Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Trump v. Vance, regarding presidential immunity from criminal subpoenas relating to the president's personal information. In doing so, he rejected arguments relating to the investiture of absolute immunity in either the Supremacy Clause or Article II of the Constitution or of presidential entitlement to a higher standard of issuance of a subpoena. Roberts emphasized this point, writing, "In our judicial system, 'the public has a right to every man's evidence'. Since the earliest days of the Republic, 'every man' has included the President of the United States."

On July 9, 2020, Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP, regarding the authority of congressional subpoenas relating to certain personal information relating to the president. In his opinion, Roberts recognized the role of executive privilege in presidential decision-making but contended that executive privilege did not preclude blanket immunity from records requests, as protection caused by executive privilege "should not be transplanted root and branch to cases involving nonprivileged, private information, which by definition does not implicate sensitive Executive Branch deliberations."

On July 1, 2024, Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Trump v. United States, writing that a president has absolute immunity for acts committed as president within their constitutional purview, presumptive immunity for official acts, and no immunity for unofficial acts. In his opinion, Roberts notes the importance of balancing fair and effective enforcement of criminal laws, alongside the effects criminal charges for a president's official acts may have in hampering a president's decision-making while in office. Presumptive immunity for such official acts is therefore necessary "to ensure that the President can undertake his constitutionally designated functions effectively, free from undue pressure or distortions", but such a presumption can be overcome provided an assertion of criminality that "pose[s] no dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch." In determining whether a potentially criminal action is official, neither a violation of law nor a president's motives in acting on said violation may be used in determining it as such. In addition, in charging a president for crimes relating to unofficial acts, evidence involving official acts may not be used, as such usage would threaten "to eviscerate the immunity [...] recognized. It would permit a prosecutor to do indirectly what he cannot do directly—invite the jury to examine acts for which a President is immune from prosecution to nonetheless prove his liability on any charge."

Campaign finance

Roberts wrote the opinion in the 2007 decision FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc., which held that provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that limited political advertising were unconstitutional as applied to WRTL's issue ads preceding the election. Roberts and Justice Alito declined to revisit the Court's 2003 decision in McConnell v. FEC at that time.

Fourth Amendment

Roberts wrote his first dissent in Georgia v. Randolph (2006). The majority's decision prohibited police from searching a home if both occupants are present, one objects, and the other consents. Roberts criticized the decision as inconsistent with prior case law a