Roberts's first job after graduation was a clerkship for Judge Henry J. Friendly, an Eisenhower appointee who was one of the most respected appellate judges of his era. Friendly was an influential voice for judicial restraint, criticizing the Warren Court for pushing rights that were not included in the Constitution. Roberts admired his deliberate approach to the law, and his reluctance to second-guess the political process. The next year, Roberts won a clerkship with Rehnquist, whom he called "the Boss." But Richard J. Lazarus, his roommate in a Capitol Hill apartment, says Judge Friendly was a more important mentor to Roberts.
"Friendly was a conservative Republican, but that didn't determine his jurisprudence," says Lazarus, a liberal Democrat who is now a Georgetown University law professor. "John had deep respect for his intellect and approach to the law."
On Tuesday, July 19, President Bush nominated John G. Roberts Jr. to be associate justice of the Supreme Court. John G. Roberts Jr., 50, has long been considered one of the Republicans' heavyweights amid the largely Democratic Washington legal establishment. Roberts was appointed to the U.S..........
Campaign for the Supreme Court
The Washington Post's Fred Barbash followed the step-by-step process of choosing a new chief justice. He'll continue to blog all of the events as President Bush nominates a candidate for associate justice.
Lazarus says Roberts was never a fire-breathing, in-your-face, red-meat Republican. But by now, he was clearly a Republican; the night of the Carter-Reagan showdown in 1980, Lazarus put a donkey on their television, and Roberts countered with an elephant. After the election, he went to work in the new administration under Attorney General William French Smith, although his direct boss was a rising Republican lawyer named Kenneth Starr.
Starr liked to play devil's advocate, and he often asked Roberts to present alternatives to approaches favored by the Justice Department bureaucracy. It was Starr who first assigned Roberts to make the case that Congress should be allowed to stop federal courts from mandating busing.
Toward the end of 1982, Roberts joined the White House counsel's office, his most partisan job by far. He drafted precise and occasionally witty legal memos, warning of the potential political damage from a housing bill, arguing that the Small Business Administration should not be permitted to disagree publicly with the administration, and at one point attacking Office of Management and Budget director David A. Stockman as "disloyal" for trying to undermine a bill with press leaks. "OMB's position calls to mind what has been said of the Roman legions: They lost many battles but they never lost a war, because they never let a war end until they had won it," Roberts wrote.
Roberts was part of a young GOP vanguard in the Reagan administration, and he was a loyal team player. But he was more of a lawyer than a political operative, even if his client was the president. He pored over documents for minute errors; he once corrected a speech proclaiming discrimination illegal "from Maine to California," because it was illegal in Alaska and Hawaii, too. He advised the White House not to help a well-connected New York computer firm with a loan, and rejected a request by the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican to let an embattled archbishop see his FBI files. He was politically savvy, but Michael A. Carvin, a Washington litigator who was at the Justice Department at the time, says Roberts was much less outspoken about his politics than his peers. He was an aggressive advocate for the administration's policies, but it was never entirely clear which ones he personally supported.
"It's not a calculated pose that he keeps his cards close to his vest; that's just the way he is," Carvin says. "I'm an obnoxious New Yorker; I spout off. He's a reserved midwesterner."
Representing His Clients
Roberts entered private practice in 1986, as an associate and then a partner at Hogan & Hartson, but Starr lured him back to government in 1989 to be deputy solicitor general, arguing the George H.W. Bush administration's cases in federal court. It was a political job, but he did not approach it in an overly political way, analyzing cases from every angle. "We had a general sense of him being comfortable with the administration's priorities," says Michael Astrue, an administration lawyer who worked with Roberts on several cases. But he was not like "a lot of very political lawyers, who wear their politics on their sleeves."
John F. Manning, who worked in the solicitor general's office and is now a Harvard Law School professor, says that if Roberts had one consistent value, it was deference to political branches. He remembers Roberts quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, describing the review of congressional laws as "the gravest and most delicate duty that this Court is called upon to perform."
"He had that quotation at his fingertips," Manning says. "I think that's a strong value for him. He doesn't think the Supreme Court should promiscuously overrule political decisions."
But that could be true of liberal decisions, as well as conservative decisions. Under Starr, Roberts developed a reputation as a lawyer's lawyer, a process guy, an incrementalist who liked fact-based arguments better than grand theories. Mit Spears, a Roberts colleague in the Reagan administration, says Roberts believes judges should be "dispassionate arbiters of balls and strikes," as opposed to "bomb-throwers."
"People who think the Supreme Court should lead the way in society are in for a bitter disappointment," Spears said.
As an administration lawyer, Roberts's advocacy for his clients did not necessarily reflect his personal beliefs. For example, his friends argue that just because Roberts signed a brief describing Roe v. Wade as "wrongly decided" does not mean he agrees. But it doesn't mean he doesn't, either. Roberts did not become an administration lawyer by accident. He has never stated his views publicly, but his friends assume he's antiabortion. And while he has never said how he would rule on Roe as a Supreme Court justice, he once suggested while discussing a euthanasia case that he is sympathetic to letting states decide matters of "terminating life."
President George H.W. Bush nominated Roberts for a federal judgeship, but the Democratic Senate did not vote on his nomination before the Clinton administration took office. So Roberts returned to Hogan & Hartson and became one of the nation's top appellate lawyers. In 1996, he married Jane Sullivan, a rainmaking corporate lawyer. They have adopted two children.
For the most part, Roberts has avoided politics. He has given $3,735 to Republican candidates -- including Bush, Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) and ex-senator Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) -- but that's not much on a salary that topped $1 million a year. He gave advice to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) during the Florida recount in 2000, but he did not sign briefs.
"I don't really feel like I know his politics," says H. Christopher Bartolomucci, a Hogan & Hartson partner who has worked closely with Roberts. "My sense is he's conservative, but he never talked about it. He's certainly conservative in the sense of respect for the text, caution, adherence to the precedent, deference to the government as opposed to social engineering."
Roberts has argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court, representing clients as diverse as Chrysler Corp., welfare recipients, the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the National Mining Association. He once argued for Hawaii's right to maintain racial preferences for native islanders, a risky move for a Republican judicial hopeful. He rarely proposed innovative legal theories, and he never seemed to use his cases to try to advance a conservative agenda. He just argued the facts and the law. He won more often than not.
In 2003, after President Bush nominated Roberts for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, he explained his overriding philosophy of the law: no overriding philosophy. He promised to take each case as it came, always putting the law ahead of his personal beliefs.
Some liberals worry that Roberts is a kind of Trojan horse -- a conservative activist who has diligently maintained a cover as an affable, conscientious, nonideological proponent of judicial restraint. But the liberals who know him best do not worry so much about that. "I guess I think of him as conservative, but I'm not even sure why," says Henrietta Wright, a former Carter administration lawyer who is close friends with the Roberts family. "He's just a genuine guy. You can't fake that for years and years."
On the other hand, it is not entirely clear why so many conservative activists believe Bush has nominated one of their own. His associations with Rehnquist, Reagan, Starr and Bush have certainly played a role. And a soft-spoken establishment conservative has a better chance of confirmation than a flame-thrower.
Roberts certainly looks the part of a conservative. He had a priest over to his home for Christmas Eve. He has made wry comments about the progressive legal theories that are rampant on law school campuses. He belongs to a country club. He plays squash.
"You know, he's an ambidextrous squash player," says Larry Robbins, his friend from the Law Review. "He favors his right, but he can use his left when the situation calls for it."
"But don't make too much of that, okay?"
Staff writers Jo Becker, Jonathan Finer, R. Jeffrey Smith and David Von Drehle contributed to this report.
