John Roberts

Chief Justice Roberts presided over the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, which began on January 16 and ended on February 5, 2020.

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 an abortion. He stated: "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 the traditional reluctance of nominees 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, however Jeffrey Rosen adds "I wouldn’t bet on Chief Justice Roberts’s siding unequivocally with the anti-Roe forces."

Roberts is assigned to the following circuits of the US federal courts system: the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the Fourth Circuit (including Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Virginia, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Circuit justices are principally responsible for responding to emergency requests (for example, applications for emergency stays of executions). Prior to confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, Roberts was assigned to cover the Ninth Circuit, but he relinquished these responsibilities during the October 2018 term

In December 2018, justices Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joined the court's four liberal justices in a denial for writ of certiorari, declining to hear a case brought by the states of Louisiana and Kansas to deny Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. Because the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, the lower court rulings in favor of Planned Parenthood still stand. In February 2019, Roberts sided with the court's liberal wing, in a 5–4 decision, granting a stay to temporarily block a Louisiana abortion restriction. The Louisiana law required that doctors performing abortions possess admitting privileges at a hospital near the facility providing the abortion, and the stay blocks that law pending review in the legal process.

In November 2018, the Associated Press approached Roberts for comment after President Donald Trump described a jurist who ruled against his asylum policy as an "Obama judge". In response, Roberts asserted that "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." Robert's remarks were widely interpreted as a rebuke of President Trump's comments.

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 stated, "[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 demonstrates an intent to preserve the Court's power and legitimacy while dually maintaining judicial independence. Chief Justice Roberts was ranked 50th in the 2016 Forbes ranking of "The World's Most Powerful People."

In Utah v. Strieff (2016), Roberts joined the majority in ruling (5–3) that a person with an outstanding warrant may be arrested and searched, and that any evidence discovered based on that search is admissible in court; the majority opinion held that this remains true even when police act unlawfully by stopping a person without reasonable suspicion, before learning of the existence of the outstanding warrant.

On November 4, 2016, Roberts was the deciding vote in a 5–3 decision to stay an execution. On February 7, 2019, Roberts was part of the majority in a 5–4 decision rejecting a Muslim inmate's request to delay execution in order to have an imam present with him during the execution. Also in February, 2019, Roberts sided with Justice Kavanaugh and the court's four liberal justices in a 6–3 decision to block the execution of a man with an "intellectual disability" in Texas.

From an early age, Roberts "stood out as the smartest kid in class." He first attended Notre Dame Elementary School, then attended La Lumiere School, a small but affluent and academically rigorous Roman Catholic boarding school in La Porte, Indiana, where he was a student and athlete. He studied five years of Latin in four years of study, necessitating the Latin teacher's creation of a one-on-one advanced curriculum for him, and was known generally for his devotion to his studies. One classmate recalled finding Roberts studying at both 8:00 am and 8:00 pm, and that he "would be physically exhausted at the end of each evening from studying." He was captain of his school's football team—he later described himself as a "slow-footed linebacker"—and was a regional champion in wrestling. He participated in choir and drama, co-edited the school newspaper, and served on the athletic council and the executive committee of the student council. Roberts graduated first in his class from La Lumiere in 1973.

"No one is very happy about the events that led to this litigation," Roberts wrote, and noted that the policies under which the girl was apprehended had since been changed. Because age discrimination is evaluated using a rational basis test, however, only weak state interests were required to justify the policy, and the panel concluded they were present. "Because parents and guardians play an essential role in that rehabilitative process, it is reasonable for the District to seek to ensure their participation, and the method chosen—detention until the parent is notified and retrieves the child—certainly does that, in a way issuing a citation might not." The court concluded that the policy and detention were constitutional, noting that "the question before us ... is not whether these policies were a bad idea, but whether they violated the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution," language reminiscent of Justice Potter Stewart's dissent in Griswold v. Connecticut. "We are not asked in this case to say whether we think this law is unwise, or even asinine," Stewart had written; "[w]e are asked to hold that it violates the United States Constitution. And that, I cannot do."

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.

Roberts is one of 14 Catholic justices—out of 114 justices total—in the history of the Supreme Court. Of those fourteen justices, five (Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, and Brett Kavanaugh) are currently serving.

On September 22, 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 casting the dissenting votes. Roberts was confirmed by the full Senate 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. However, all subsequent confirmation votes have been even narrower.

In Carpenter v. United States, a landmark decision involving privacy of cellular phone data, Roberts wrote the majority opinion in a 5–4 ruling that searches of cellular phone data generally require a warrant.

In 2013, Roberts wrote the 5-4 majority opinion that the appellants seeking to uphold Proposition 8 in California, which was ruled unconstitutional by lower courts, did not have standing and the lower courts' rulings were allowed to stand and same-sex marriages resumed in California. Roberts dissented in United States v. Windsor in which the 5-4 majority ruled that key parts of the Defense of Marriage Act were unconstitutional. The case allowed the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages performed in jurisdictions where legal. He dissented in the Obergefell v. Hodges case in which Kennedy wrote for the majority, again 5-4, that same-sex couples had a right to marry. In Pavan v. Smith, the Supreme Court "summarily overruled" the Arkansas Supreme Court's decision that the state did not have to list same-sex spouses on birth certificates thus siding with same-sex couples who filed the lawsuit; Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented but Roberts did not join their dissent leaving open speculation that he might have ruled with the majority.

On June 28, 2012, Roberts delivered the majority opinion in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, which upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by a 5–4 vote. The Court indicated that although the "individual mandate" component of the Act could not be upheld under the Commerce Clause, the mandate could be construed as a tax and was therefore ruled to be valid under Congress's authority to "lay and collect taxes." The Court overturned a portion of the law related to the withholding of funds from states that did not comply with the expansion of Medicaid; Roberts wrote that "Congress is not free ... to penalize states that choose not to participate in that new program by taking away their existing Medicaid funding." Sources within the Supreme Court state that Roberts switched his vote regarding the individual mandate sometime after an initial vote and that Roberts largely wrote both the majority and minority opinions. This extremely unusual circumstance has also been used to explain why the minority opinion was also unsigned, itself a rare phenomenon from the Supreme Court.

Following his concurrence in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), Roberts wrote the majority decision for another landmark campaign finance case called McCutcheon v. FEC (2014). In McCutcheon the court ruled that "aggregate limits" on the combined amount a donor could give to various federal candidates or party committees violated the First Amendment.

On April 20, 2010, in United States v. Stevens, the Supreme Court struck down an animal cruelty law. Roberts, writing for an 8–1 majority, found that a federal statute criminalizing the commercial production, sale, or possession of depictions of cruelty to animals, was an unconstitutional abridgment of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. The Court held that the statute was substantially overbroad; for example, it could allow prosecutions for selling photos of out-of-season hunting.

In August 2010, Roberts sold his stock in Pfizer, which allowed him to participate in two pending cases involving the pharmaceutical maker. Justices are required to recuse themselves in cases in which they own stock of a party.

As the chief justice, Roberts also serves in a variety of non-judicial roles, including chancellor of the Smithsonian Institution and leading the Judicial Conference of the United States. Perhaps the best known of these is the custom of the chief justice administering the oath of office at presidential inaugurations. Roberts debuted in this capacity at the inauguration of Barack Obama on January 20, 2009. (As a senator, Obama had voted against Roberts's confirmation to the Supreme Court, making the event doubly a first: the first time a president was sworn in by someone whose confirmation he opposed.) Things did not go smoothly. According to columnist Jeffrey Toobin:

On the Supreme Court, Roberts has indicated he supports some abortion restrictions. In Gonzales v. Carhart (2007), he voted with the majority to uphold the constitutionality of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a five-justice majority, distinguished Stenberg v. Carhart, and concluded that the court's previous decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey did not prevent Congress from banning the procedure. The decision left the door open for future as-applied challenges, and did not address the broader question of whether Congress had the authority to pass the law. Justice Clarence Thomas filed a concurring opinion, contending that the Court's prior decisions in Roe v. Wade and Casey should be reversed; Roberts declined to join that opinion.

Roberts authored the 2007 student free speech case Morse v. Frederick, ruling that a student in a public school-sponsored activity does not have the right to advocate drug use on the basis that the right to free speech does not invariably prevent the exercise of school discipline.

In the summer of 2007, Roberts suffered a seizure while he was at his vacation home on Hupper Island off the village of Port Clyde in St. George, Maine. As a result of the seizure he fell 5 to 10 feet (1.5 to 3.0 m) on a dock near his house but suffered only minor scrapes. He was taken by private boat to the mainland (which is several hundred yards from the island) and then by ambulance to Penobscot Bay Medical Center in Rockport, where he stayed overnight, according to Supreme Court spokesperson Kathy Arberg. Doctors called the incident a benign idiopathic seizure, which means there was no identifiable physiological cause.

The court held open the possibility of judicial review of the results of the military commission after the current proceedings ended. This decision was overturned on June 29, 2006, by the Supreme Court in a 5–3 decision, with Roberts not participating due to his prior participation in the case as a circuit judge.

On January 17, 2006, Roberts dissented along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in Gonzales v. Oregon, which held that the Controlled Substances Act does not allow the United States attorney general to prohibit physicians from prescribing drugs for the assisted suicide of the terminally ill as permitted by an Oregon law. The point of contention in the case was largely one of statutory interpretation, not federalism.

On March 6, 2006, Roberts wrote the unanimous decision in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights that colleges accepting federal money must allow military recruiters on campus, despite university objections to the Clinton administration-initiated "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

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 but one objected and the other consented. Roberts criticized the majority opinion as inconsistent with prior case law and for partly basing its reasoning on its perception of social custom. He said the social expectation test was flawed because the Fourth Amendment protects a legitimate expectation of privacy, not social expectations.

On July 19, 2005, President Bush nominated Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court to fill a vacancy that would be created by the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Roberts was the first Supreme Court nominee since Stephen Breyer in 1994. Bush announced Roberts's nomination in a live, nationwide television broadcast from the East Room of the White House at 9 p.m. Eastern Time.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died on September 3, 2005, while Roberts's confirmation was still pending before the Senate. Shortly thereafter, on September 5, Bush withdrew Roberts's nomination as O'Connor's successor and announced Roberts's new nomination to the position of Chief Justice. Bush asked the Senate to expedite Roberts's confirmation hearings to fill the vacancy by the beginning of the Supreme Court's session in early October.

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, prior to the first oral arguments of the 2005 term.

In 2003, Roberts was appointed as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit by George W. Bush. During his two-year tenure on the D.C. Circuit, Roberts authored 49 opinions, eliciting two dissents from other judges, and authoring three dissents of his own. In 2005, Roberts was nominated to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court, initially to succeed the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor. When Rehnquist died before Roberts's confirmation hearings began, Bush instead nominated Roberts to fill the Chief Justice position. Bush would later appoint Samuel Alito to the Associate Justice position that was originally for Roberts.

According to a 16-page financial disclosure form Roberts submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee prior to his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, his net worth was more than $6 million, including $1.6 million in stock holdings. At the time Roberts left private practice to join the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2003, he took a pay cut from $1 million a year to $171,800; as Chief Justice, his salary is $255,500 as of 2014. Roberts also holds a one-eighth interest in a cottage in Knocklong, an Irish village in County Limerick.

On May 9, 2001, President George W. Bush nominated Roberts to a seat on the D.C. Circuit to replace Judge James L. Buckley, who had recently retired. However, the Democratic Party had a majority in the Senate at the time and was in conflict with Bush over his judicial nominees. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy refused to give Roberts a hearing in the 107th Congress. The GOP regained control of the Senate on January 7, 2003, and Bush resubmitted Roberts's nomination that day. Roberts was confirmed on May 8, 2003, and received his commission on June 2, 2003. During his two-year tenure on the D.C. Circuit, Roberts authored 49 opinions, eliciting two dissents from other judges, and authoring three dissents of his own.

In 2000, Roberts traveled to Tallahassee, Florida, to advise Jeb Bush, then the governor of Florida, concerning the latter's actions in the Florida election recount during the presidential election.

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

Roberts and his wife, Jane Sullivan, have been married since 1996. Sullivan is a lawyer who became a prominent legal recruiter at the firms of Major, Lindsey & Africa and Mlegal. Along with Clarence Thomas, she is on the Board of Trustees at her alma mater, the College of the Holy Cross. The couple have two adopted children: John "Jack" and Josephine "Josie".

Roberts left the Office of the Solicitor General in 1993 following Bush's defeat by Bill Clinton in the 1992 U.S. presidential election, and returned to Hogan & Hartson as a partner. He became the head of the firm's appellate practice, and also became an adjunct professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center. During this time, Roberts argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court, prevailing in 25 of them. He represented 19 states in United States v. Microsoft. Those cases include:

Roberts had suffered a similar seizure in 1993. After this first seizure, Roberts temporarily limited some of his activities, such as driving. According to Senator Arlen Specter, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee during Roberts's nomination to be Chief Justice in 2005, senators were aware of this seizure when they were considering his nomination, but the committee did not think it was significant enough to bring up during his confirmation hearings. Federal judges are not required by law to release information about their health.

During the late 1990s, while working for Hogan & Hartson, Roberts served as a member of the steering committee of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the conservative Federalist Society.

In 1989, Roberts joined the administration of newly elected president George H. W. Bush as Principal Deputy Solicitor General. He served as the acting solicitor general for the purposes of at least one case when the sitting solicitor general, Ken Starr, had a conflict of interest. In 1992, Bush nominated Roberts to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, but no Senate vote was held, and Roberts's nomination expired at the end of the 102nd Congress.

In 1986, Roberts entered private law practice in Washington, D.C., as an associate at the law firm Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells) and worked in the field of corporate law. As part of Hogan & Hartson's pro bono practice, he worked behind the scenes for gay rights advocates, reviewing filings and preparing arguments for the 1996 Supreme Court case Romer v. Evans, which was described in 2005 as "the movement's most important legal victory". Roberts also argued on behalf of the homeless, a case which became one of Roberts's "few appellate losses." Another pro bono matter was a death penalty case in which he represented John Ferguson, who was convicted of killing eight people in Florida.

Roberts had originally planned to pursue a Ph.D. in history and become a professor but decided to attend law school instead. He remained at Harvard and attended Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Law Review and served as its managing editor during his third year. He graduated in 1979 with a J.D. magna cum laude.

After graduating from law school, Roberts first clerked for Judge Henry Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1979 to 1980, then clerked for Justice (later Chief Justice in 1986) William Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1980 to 1981. After his clerkships, Roberts began working for the U.S. government in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, first from 1981 to 1982 as a special assistant to William French Smith, the U.S. Attorney General, then from 1982 to 1986 as an associate with the White House Counsel.

After graduating from La Lumiere, Roberts became the first student in the school's history to be admitted to Harvard University. Due to his academic excellence in high school, Roberts entered Harvard with sophomore (second-year) standing. He majored in history, and one of his first papers, "Marxism and Bolshevism: Theory and Practice," won Harvard's William Scott Ferguson Prize for most outstanding essay by a sophomore history major. Roberts spent three years as an undergraduate at Harvard, returning to Indiana each summer to earn money working on the floor of the steel plant his father managed. In his senior year, his paper "The Utopian Conservative: A Study of Continuity and Change in the Thought of Daniel Webster" won Harvard's 1976 Bowdoin Prize for the "English Language" category. He graduated from Harvard in 1976 with an A.B. summa cum laude and membership in Phi Beta Kappa, having written a senior honors thesis entitled "Old and New Liberalism: The British Liberal Party's Approach to the Social Problem, 1906–1914."

John Glover Roberts Jr. (born January 27, 1955) is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as Chief Justice of the United States. Roberts has authored the majority opinion in several landmark cases, including Shelby County v. Holder, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, King v. Burwell, and Department of Commerce v. New York. He has been described as having a conservative judicial philosophy in his jurisprudence but has shown a willingness to work with the Supreme Court's liberal bloc, and since the retirement of Anthony Kennedy in 2018 has come to be regarded as a key swing vote on the Court.

John Glover Roberts Jr. was born on January 27, 1955, in Buffalo, New York, the son of Rosemary (née Podrasky; 1929–2019) and John Glover "Jack" Roberts Sr. (1928–2008). His father had Irish and Welsh ancestry and his mother was of Slovak descent. He has an elder sister, Kathy, and two younger sisters, Peggy and Barbara. Roberts spent his early childhood years in Hamburg, New York, where his father worked as an electrical engineer for the Bethlehem Steel Corporation at its large factory in Lackawanna. In 1965, when Roberts was ten years old, his family moved to Long Beach, Indiana, so his father could take a job as the plant manager for a new Bethlehem Steel plant in nearby Burns Harbor.