Judging Chief Justice Roberts, Ten Years in

By Published on November 13, 2015

Is John Roberts a good judge? Ten years ago, President Bush appointed him chief justice of the United States. His anniversary, coinciding with the Supreme Court’s reconvening last month, naturally caused lawyers, scholars, and politicians to reflect upon his legacy on the Supreme Court.

And all the more so in light of his performance in the waning days of the Court’s previous term, when Roberts issued two of his most controversial decisions. In King v. Burwell, he surprised many by rescuing the Obamacare health insurance exchanges through what many would call a strained statutory interpretation. The next day, in Obergefell v. Hodges, he penned perhaps the most emphatic dissenting opinion of his career, calling the five-justice majority’s constitutionalization of same-sex marriage rights “an act of will, not legal judgment,” with “no basis in the Constitution.”

Roberts prefers to avoid “legacy” talk. “I don’t think it’s terribly fruitful to try to think about that,” he said in a 2012 forum at Rice University. The school’s president, David Leebron, had asked him, “after your time on the Court, how would you like historians to remember your leadership of the Court and what it represented?”

When Roberts eventually answered, he put it simply. “I would like people to think that I was a good judge,” he told Leebron, his former Harvard Law Review colleague. “Nothing more or less than that.”

Read the article “Judging Chief Justice Roberts, Ten Years in” on weeklystandard.com.

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