Nominee's Wife Is A Feminist After Her Own Heart

"Our class was idealized, mythologized as an amazing class of strong forthright women, probably even to an exaggerated degree," recalls Kim McElaney, a friend of "Janey's." By their senior year, a woman was editor of the school newspaper and a feminist club had formed.

Jane Sullivan was a math major known for being thoughtful and close to her professors. Like many of the students, she attended chapel regularly, went on religious retreats and did service work, but even so, she was on the devout end of the spectrum.

"She was known for her authenticity," says McElaney. "She was not one of those people who live one wild party life Saturday and another on Sunday."

Her fun was clean: She organized swing dances for her dorm and liked to ice skate. To this day, none of her friends or colleagues who were interviewed claims to have heard her curse.

After college she won a scholarship from the Rotary Foundation to study at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where she earned a degree in education. Then she went to Brown University, where she got a degree in math, and finally to Georgetown University Law School.

By the time she came to the firm where she works now -- after clerking for Judge James M. Sprouse in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit and working at another law firm, Piper Rudnick Gray Cary -- she had a deliberateness and maturity that stood out among the junior associates, says Kearns. She was ambitious but unpretentious, driving the same Volkswagen Bug for years.

Sullivan began as a litigator, then moved on to the highly technical field of satellite procurement. In 1996 she married John Roberts, whom she had met once years earlier through mutual friends. (One of the groomsmen was Michael Luttig, an appeals court judge who was also on the short list for the Supreme Court nomination.) By then she was 42, and Catholic doctrine prohibits most forms of fertility treatment. She and her husband went though an "uncertain difficult period where she wanted badly to have children," says Kearns.

For a long time the adoption process didn't work out, but Roberts never lost hope, Kearns says. Five years ago they adopted a daughter, Josephine, and in less than a year a son, John, and Roberts was suddenly a 45-year-old mother of two infants.

Two years ago she scaled down -- she stopped practicing law and was tapped to start the firm's in-house training and evaluation program. She's still on the boards of Holy Cross College and the John Carroll Society, a Catholic lay group. She and her family live in Chevy Chase and her children attend Episcopal Day School.

Her kids found it strange to see their dad's face on TV in a little box, she told colleagues before the nomination was announced. This week she has been too busy to go to the office.