Path to the Supreme Court
In the first week of September 2005, the president's nominee to the Supreme Court helped carry a casket up the Court's marble steps. William Rehnquist (§100) had died on the 3rd; his pallbearers were his former law clerks, and among them was John Roberts, who had served in his chambers a quarter century before and who, within the month, would be confirmed to his seat, the first justice in the Court's history to succeed the justice for whom he clerked. Brett Kavanaugh (§114) later became the second. A week after the funeral, Roberts sat before the Judiciary Committee and delivered the most quoted metaphor in the history of confirmations: 'Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules, they apply them.' A limited role, he said, and 'Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.' He promised, 'I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.' Two decades on, the metaphor is quoted mostly against him, by critics left and right who count the rules his Court has rewritten. The record beneath the argument is stranger than either side allows: the umpire has spent twenty years as the least dissenting, most institutionally anxious member of a Court that kept outrunning him.
John Glover Roberts Jr. was born in Buffalo, New York, on January 27, 1955, and moved at ten to Long Beach, Indiana, a Catholic, Republican town on the Lake Michigan shore, where his father, an electrical engineer, helped manage Bethlehem Steel's new Burns Harbor mill. The boy applied to La Lumiere, a small Catholic boarding school nearby, with a letter that reads today like a thesis statement: 'I won't be content to get a good job by getting a good education, I want to get the best job by getting the best education.' He got both. At La Lumiere he captained the football team, won a regional wrestling championship, sang in the choir, co-edited the paper, and graduated first in the class of 1973. Harvard took him as a sophomore; he finished the history degree summa cum laude in three years, then Harvard Law School, magna cum laude, managing editor of the law review, class of 1979. The apprenticeships that followed were the finest the profession offered: a year with Judge Henry Friendly of the Second Circuit, the most admired judge not on the Supreme Court, and then October Term 1980 with Justice Rehnquist, whose relaxed chambers and unrelaxed conservatism left a lasting print.
The Reagan administration made him a Washington lawyer. He served as special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith, then spent four years as an associate White House counsel, writing memos whose confident, needling wit would delight and alarm readers when the files surfaced in 2005. After a first stint at the firm of Hogan & Hartson he returned to government in 1989 as Principal Deputy Solicitor General, the political deputy in the office that argues for the United States. The advocate became the best of his generation: across his career he argued thirty-nine cases in the Supreme Court, winning more than he lost, with a preparation regimen, hundreds of practice questions, answers rehearsed in triplets, that became the model for the modern appellate bar. President George H. W. Bush nominated him to the D.C. Circuit on January 27, 1992, his thirty-seventh birthday; the election-year Senate never acted, and the nomination died. He went back to Hogan & Hartson and built its appellate practice into the country's premier Supreme Court shop. In 1996 he married Jane Sullivan, a lawyer with a mathematician's training; they adopted two children, Josie and Jack.
The second chance at the D.C. Circuit came in 2001, and after a two-year Democratic blockade he was confirmed by voice vote in May 2003, to the seat, as it happened, that Elena Kagan (§112) had been nominated to in 1999 and never got a hearing for; the future Chief and the future justice were casualties of the same stalled machinery, four years apart. His two years on the circuit produced a modest shelf and two famous flourishes: a lament for the twelve-year-old arrested, handcuffed, and booked for eating a single french fry in a Metro station, in an opinion that nonetheless upheld the arrest, and a dissent questioning whether the Commerce Clause reached 'a hapless toad that, for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California.'
Then the vacancies came in pairs. On July 19, 2005, President George W. Bush nominated him for the seat of the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor (§102). Seven weeks later Rehnquist was dead, and on September 5 the president withdrew the first nomination and named him Chief Justice instead; O'Connor's seat went, in time, to Samuel Alito (§110). The hearings were a rout. Democrats found the 1980s memos sharp-elbowed but the witness unassailable; he answered through three days of questioning without a note. 'I have no agenda, but I do have a commitment,' he told the committee, and 'Judges are not politicians who can promise to do certain things in exchange for votes.' The Senate confirmed him 78 to 22 on September 29, 2005, and he was sworn in that afternoon: the seventeenth Chief Justice, and at fifty the youngest since John Marshall took the center chair at forty-five.
On the Supreme Court
The first decade belonged to the movement that raised him. He wrote Parents Involved (2007), refusing to let school districts assign students by race, with the era's most quoted aphorism: 'The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.' He wrote Shelby County v. Holder (2013), retiring the Voting Rights Act's preclearance formula: 'Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.' Citizens United, the arbitration cases, the class-action rules: the Roberts Court's first act was everything the 2005 opposition predicted. The exception made him famous. In June 2012, in NFIB v. Sebelius, the Chief Justice construed the Affordable Care Act's mandate as a tax and saved the statute, writing that 'It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices'; CBS News reported that he had switched his vote during deliberations, and the movement that raised him has never fully forgiven the defection. Three years later he saved the act again in King v. Burwell, and dissented from Obergefell v. Hodges in the first dissent he had ever read from the bench: the majority's right 'has no basis in the Constitution or this Court's precedent.' 'Just who do we think we are?' To the celebrants he offered the coldest congratulation in the reports: 'But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.'
The second decade made him the axis. Kennedy's retirement in 2018 made the Chief Justice, by the political scientists' measures, the Court's median vote, ground no Chief had held since Charles Evans Hughes, and he used the position as a brake. He joined the liberal justices to block the census citizenship question, writing that the administration's stated rationale was 'contrived'; joined them again to stop the rescission of DACA; and in November 2018, when the president attacked an 'Obama judge,' issued a rare public rebuke of a sitting president: '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.' Fourteen months later he presided, silent and scrupulous, over the impeachment trial of the man he had corrected. Then the brake failed. Barrett's (§115) arrival in 2020 moved the median off the Chief, and Dobbs measured the loss exactly: alone, concurring only in the judgment, he asked the majority to uphold Mississippi's law without overruling Roe, calling the overruling 'a serious jolt to the legal system.' Nobody joined him. Two years later he consolidated with the majority he could no longer moderate and wrote Trump v. United States, the presidential-immunity decision, insisting in its final pages that 'The President is not above the law'; his critics have been quoting the sentence back at him ever since.
The institution's ledger fell to him too. Under siege over undisclosed gifts and recusal fights, the Court adopted its first code of conduct in November 2023, with no enforcement mechanism beyond the justices themselves; Roberts had already declined the Senate Judiciary Committee's invitation to testify, citing the separation of powers. His 2024 year-end report warned against threats to judges and open defiance of court orders, and read, within weeks, like a preface. The 2025 term, by this site's coding, shows what the warning became in practice: six opinions of the Court, and the term's marquee separation-of-powers lineups assembled around him. In Trump v. Barbara he wrote for himself, the three liberal justices, and Barrett; in Trump v. Cook, for the liberals and Kavanaugh; in Trump v. Slaughter, for six; and in the tariff case, Learning Resources v. Trump, he announced the judgment against the administration's signature economic program over dissents from Thomas (§106), Alito, and Kavanaugh. He even crossed to join Barrett's dissent in T.M. v. University of Maryland Medical System, beside Kagan and Gorsuch (§113), a lineup no model of the Court predicts. The umpire of 2005 spent the term calling strikes on the executive branch.
The numbers say the metaphor was never entirely false. By the Supreme Court Database's coding, as computed for this site, he has cast a liberal vote in 41.9 percent of more than 1,400 cases against a 49.4 percent average for the colleagues on the same cases, the least conservative record of the Court's six Republican appointees, and he dissents in 9.4 percent of his cases against his colleagues' 18.2, half their rate, the profile of a man who lives in the majority and steers from inside it. The paradox is that his measured circuit-era ideology score (JuDJIS +0.67) is the most conservative of any sitting justice's circuit record, ranking 9th of 451 measured federal appellate careers: the most conservative resume on the bench produced its most centrist Republican vote. Whether the office did that, or the median seat did, or the man was always more broker than crusader, is the central interpretive question of his tenure.
He marked twenty years as Chief in September 2025, past Rehnquist's tenure in the center chair before him, with the hardest years arriving late: a Court whose legitimacy he guards polling near its historic lows, an executive testing the orders his 2024 report defended, and a docket that keeps forcing the choice between the majority he belongs to and the institution he answers for. The young lawyer wanted the best job; he has it, and it has him. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire. They watch this one. He continues to serve.
The Voting Record
How Roberts voted in the 1,458 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 2005 term through the 2024 term, using that database’s classification of each vote as liberal or conservative. The gold tick on each bar is the rate for the other justices sitting on those same cases.
Across the whole career Roberts voted with Scalia more than with anyone else — the same side of the judgment in 78.7% of their 431 divided cases — and with Ginsburg least, at 42.8%. See the matrices →Compared against the 9 colleagues Roberts shared at least 300 divided cases with.
And Roberts ended 4.3 points more liberal relative to those colleagues than at the start — the 21st-largest shift of the 27 justices with a long enough record to measure. See who changed →
How conservative is Roberts? The full ideology profile: the record measured, the bloc mapped, and the 19 cases where Roberts broke from it.
Source · The Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.) · how these figures are made
Key Decisions
National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius
2012 · 5–4Holding · The Affordable Care Act's individual mandate exceeds Congress's commerce power but is valid as an exercise of the taxing power.
Role · Roberts broke with the other conservatives to write the controlling opinion, saving the ACA.
The defining act of his institutionalism — and, to critics, of result-driven reasoning.
Read the opinion →Trump v. United States
2024Holding · A former President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for exercises of his core constitutional powers, at least presumptive immunity for other official acts, and no immunity for unofficial acts.
Role · Roberts wrote for the Court, 6–3.
The defining separation-of-powers ruling of his third decade; its closing insistence that 'The President is not above the law' is now quoted by both his defenders and his critics.
Read the opinion →Shelby County v. Holder
2013 · 5–4Holding · The Voting Rights Act's coverage formula for subjecting certain states to federal preclearance is unconstitutional because it rests on decades-old data.
Role · Roberts wrote for the Court.
Freed covered jurisdictions from federal oversight and reshaped American election law; Ginsburg's (§107) dissent called it 'throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm.'
Read the opinion →Department of Commerce v. New York
2019 · 5–4Holding · The administration's stated reason for adding a citizenship question to the census 'appears to have been contrived' and cannot stand on this record.
Role · Roberts wrote the controlling opinion, joining the liberals on the decisive point.
A rare judicial check on executive rationale, and a clear example of Roberts's institutional caution.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
John Roberts has led the Supreme Court since 2005 as its seventeenth Chief Justice — a brilliant appellate advocate turned cautious institutionalist who has spent two decades trying to steer a polarized Court, and a polarized country, away from the appearance of pure politics. Nominated by George W. Bush first to replace Sandra Day O'Connor (§102) and then, on Rehnquist's death, elevated to lead the Court, he promised at his confirmation to act as an 'umpire' who calls 'balls and strikes' rather than a player. His most consequential single act was to supply the fifth vote — and write the opinion — upholding the Affordable Care Act in NFIB v. Sebelius, construing its mandate as a tax and infuriating conservatives who had counted on him; yet he also wrote Shelby County v. Holder, which struck the heart out of the Voting Rights Act. An incrementalist who prizes narrow rulings and the Court's legitimacy, he found that institution tested as never before by the arrival of a six-justice conservative majority that repeatedly moved faster and further than he preferred, as in Dobbs, which he would have decided more narrowly. Joan Biskupic's The Chief is the essential biography. Begin there, then read the ACA and Voting Rights decisions, and his own 'umpire' credo.
The Bookshelf
The definitive biography, by the veteran Court journalist who has chronicled a generation of justices. Biskupic traces Roberts's Indiana boyhood, his rise as the finest Supreme Court advocate of his era, his brief appellate judgeship, and his two decades as Chief — with special insight into the NFIB deliberations, where she reports he changed his vote to save the Affordable Care Act. Balanced and richly sourced, it captures the tension at the center of his tenure: an instinctive conservative who cares intensely about the Court's institutional standing. Basic Books.
The best narrative of the Roberts Court's first decade — the veteran Court reporter Marcia Coyle tells it through four blockbusters (guns, campaign finance, health care, voting rights), showing the Chief's long game and his losses. Simon & Schuster.
The constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz on the Roberts Court's jurisprudence — a nuanced argument that it is less predictable, and less monolithically conservative, than either side believes. The sophisticated doctrinal reading. Henry Holt.
Mark Tushnet's scholarly account of law and politics on the Roberts Court — the academic counterpart to the journalists' narratives, mapping the blocs, the doctrinal stakes, and the Chief's institutional caution. W. W. Norton.
Jeffrey Toobin's gripping narrative of the collision between the Obama White House and the Roberts Court — Citizens United, the health-care case, and the frosty relationship between the president and the Chief who fumbled his inaugural oath and then, improbably, saved his signature law. Doubleday.
The inside story of the conservative campaign to remake the Court that produced Roberts's own appointment — Jan Crawford Greenburg's well-sourced account of the nominations from Reagan through Roberts and Alito. Penguin Press.
David Kaplan's critical, behind-the-scenes narrative of the modern Court — the argument that the justices, Roberts foremost, have grasped more power than a democracy should grant them, and should be more modest than they are. Crown.
Roberts's brief, famous statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the credo by which his whole tenure has been measured. Judges, he said, are like umpires: 'Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them,' and his job would be 'to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.' Admirers cite it as a model of judicial modesty; critics have thrown it back at him whenever a ruling seemed to make rather than apply law. Read it as the promise against which two decades of decisions can be tested, and as a compact statement of the modest judicial role he claims. Widely available in the hearing transcript.
Roberts's most consequential and most debated opinion, and the clearest window into his institutionalism. Breaking with the other conservatives, he held that the individual mandate exceeded Congress's commerce power but survived as a valid exercise of the taxing power — a construction that saved the Affordable Care Act and drew accusations of result-driven reasoning from the right and relief from the left. Whether read as statesmanship or sophistry, it shows a Chief Justice acutely conscious that a decision striking down a president's signature law along party lines would wound the Court. Read it beside Shelby County to see both sides of the man.
The decision that shows Roberts's conservatism at its most consequential. Writing for a five-to-four Court, he held that the coverage formula subjecting certain states to federal preclearance of voting changes was unconstitutional because it rested on decades-old data — freeing those jurisdictions from oversight and reshaping American election law. Ginsburg's dissent (§107) called it 'like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm'; defenders called it overdue federalism. Read the majority and dissent together as the sharpest illustration of the divide over race, voting, and the Court's role that runs through the Roberts era.
Roberts's clearest statement of judicial modesty, and his critics' clearest target. Writing for a 5–4 Court, he held that partisan-gerrymandering claims are beyond the reach of the federal courts — a matter of 'politics,' not law — leaving even the most extreme district-rigging to the political process. The signature Roberts move: the Court declining to decide. Free online.
The standard modern biographical encyclopedia of the Court: a signed essay on each of the 110 justices from Jay to Alito, alphabetically arranged, by a named scholar or journalist. Length tracks reputation — two pages for Thomas Johnson, three for Woods, eleven for Holmes — which is itself a rough map of who the literature has bothered with. It is not a substitute for a biography, and for the justices who have never had one it is often the most careful short account in print. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The Reading Path
A researched route through the literature — in order.
- 1.Biskupic, The Chief — for the definitive life and the man behind the institution
- 2.NFIB v. Sebelius — for the vote that saved the ACA and defined his institutionalism
- 3.Shelby County v. Holder — for his conservatism at its most consequential
- 4.The 2005 'umpire' statement — for the credo against which his tenure is measured
- 5.Coyle, The Roberts Court — for the Chief’s long game across four blockbuster terms
Where the Papers Are Kept
Roberts continues to serve as Chief Justice, and his judicial papers are not open to researchers. For the study of his tenure the essential materials are the Court's own opinions and orders, the open collections of predecessors and colleagues at the Library of Congress, and contemporary reporting; the Federal Judicial Center and Oyez provide the biographical and case record. His years as an advocate are documented in the Reagan and Bush administration archives. Visit →
Ideas for Further Research
- The umpire and the institutionalist. Roberts has cast himself as a neutral arbiter and a steward of the Court's legitimacy, sometimes voting to slow or narrow rulings his fellow conservatives would push further. Test the umpire ideal against the record — NFIB, Shelby County, Dobbs, the cases on the census and presidential power — and ask whether institutional stewardship is a coherent judicial philosophy or a temperament that yields, case by case, to the majority around him.
- The Chief who lost his Court. Roberts spent years building incremental conservative majorities, only to be repeatedly outrun after 2020 by a six-justice bloc willing to move faster and overrule more, as in Dobbs, where he sought a narrower path and could not hold it. Study the limits of a Chief Justice's power over a determined majority, and ask what leadership means for a Chief who can no longer control the pace or the reach of his own Court.
- Legitimacy in an age of distrust. More than any modern Chief, Roberts has worried aloud about public confidence in the Court amid falling approval, ethics controversies, and charges of partisanship. Examine his efforts to protect the Court's standing — his rhetoric, his votes, his handling of the shadow docket and recusal questions — and ask whether a Chief Justice can preserve an institution's legitimacy from within when the country's trust in it is fracturing. Seat lineage: William Rehnquist §100 (as Chief Justice) → John Roberts → (still serving).