How Conservative Is John Roberts?
The Chief Justice, measured: every vote since 2005, the highest floor on the bench, and the 19 cases where he left his own bloc — 14 of them to build a majority.
Conservative on the record — 41.9% liberal against 49.4% for the colleagues who heard the same cases, 24th most liberal of the 33 justices rankable since 1946 — and the most consequential departure from that record on the Court. Roberts left a near-united bloc of the other five Republican appointees 19 times in 124 cases, and 14 of the 19 were majorities. That is what a Chief Justice with the assignment power and a taste for narrow rulings looks like in the numbers: not a swing vote choosing sides, but the man who most often decides which side becomes five.
The record, against every justice since 1946
The Supreme Court Database codes each vote liberal or conservative, issue by issue, under definitions explained here. Roberts’s career share is 41.9% liberal across 1,405 coded votes since 2005, against 49.4% for the same-case colleagues — a gap of 7.5 points. Unlike the three justices appointed after him, he has served long enough to rank: 24th most liberal of the 33 justices since 1946, which puts him in the conservative half of the table and above Gorsuch, Thomas and Alito within it.
By subject the pattern is a prosecutor’s Court with one exception. Criminal procedure is his largest docket and his most conservative — 36.1% liberal against a 46.7% baseline — while in federalism he runs 64.9% against 57.9%, the one area where he sits to the left of the justices around him. The drift series records the gap between him and his colleagues narrowing by 4.3 points across his tenure — not because he moved, on the evidence there, so much as because the bench moved past him.
Where he sits on the current Court
Agreement in divided cases, the 2020 through 2024 terms — how often each colleague was on the Chief Justice’s side of the judgment when the Court split:
This is the chart Kavanaugh’s page describes from the other side: 92.1% between them, the closest any two justices come on the current Court. Below it, the fall is the gentlest measured anywhere on these pages. His floor — 45.2% with Sotomayor — is the highest floor of the nine, and he is the only justice who agrees with two members of the opposite bloc in a majority of divided cases (Kagan 54.2%, Jackson 50.5%). Every other page on this site has a cliff somewhere. This one does not.
When he breaks from the bloc
Same test as the other conservative pages, and worth stating precisely because the Chief Justice is where it does the most work: a divided case in which at least four of the other five Republican appointees voted together and Roberts voted the other way. Four of five, not five of five — a bloc does not stop being a bloc because one member also crossed, and on this Court the member who also crossed is usually Kavanaugh. It happened 19 times in 124 such cases across the 2020 through 2024 terms, 15.3%, third among the six behind Gorsuch and Thomas.
What separates him from both of them is the form. Thomas’s breaks are dissents and often solitary; Gorsuch’s are dissents three times in four. 14 of the Chief Justice’s 19 are majorities — the largest count of winning departures on the Court — and the database codes 15 of the 19 liberal against 3 conservative. He almost never goes alone: Kavanaugh was with him in 11 of the 19 and Gorsuch in 5.
The majority-builder
The fourteen majorities are the Court’s cross-bloc docket, and he wrote four of them himself: Biden v. Texas, holding the return-to-Mexico authority discretionary; Allen v. Milligan, refusing Alabama’s invitation to rewrite the Voting Rights Act framework; Becerra v. San Carlos Apache Tribe, on the costs the Indian Health Service owes tribes that run their own programs; and Perttu v. Richards, keeping a jury question from being decided by a judge. The rest he joined — Sotomayor’s in Salinas and Cruz, Kagan’s in Minerva and Nance, Breyer’s in Torres, Jackson’s in Texas v. New Mexico, Gorsuch’s in Velázquez, Kavanaugh’s in Williams v. Reed — which is the point of him. One analyst counts twelve cross-bloc 5–4 majorities since Jackson joined the Court and calls the Chief Justice its “central majority builder”; the same study notes that seven of Kavanaugh’s eight pivotal appearances included him.
The five dissents
He dissents from his own bloc rarely, and the five are worth naming. In Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson — the S.B. 8 case — he wrote for himself and all three liberals that “Texas has employed an array of stratagems designed to shield its unconstitutional law from judicial review.” In Purdue Pharma he joined Kavanaugh’s dissent with two liberals; in Warhol he and Kagan dissented alone; in EPA v. Calumet he and Gorsuch did. And in Uzuegbunam he stood entirely by himself — the only case in twenty terms where he was the lone justice in the minority — arguing that a suit for one dollar of nominal damages is not a live controversy and that the Court “sees no problem with turning judges into advice columnists.”
The umpire, twenty terms on
Of 1,444 recorded votes, 135 are dissents — 9.4% against a 18.2% baseline, a 8.8-point gap second only to Kavanaugh’s. He wrote 30 regular concurrences in twenty terms, fewer than Kavanaugh has written in seven. The Chief Justice’s separate writing is rare because his preferred instrument is the majority opinion, and the Chief assigns it.
The metaphor he chose in 2005 — “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them… Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire” — has been argued over ever since, and the votes here neither prove nor refute it. What they do show is the narrowness he keeps returning to, stated most plainly in his Dobbs concurrence, which would have upheld the Mississippi law without overruling Roe: “If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.” It is the same instinct that produced the saving construction in NFIB v. Sebelius, the pretext holding in the census case, and the stare decisis vote in June Medical — and the same instinct that answered a president in 2018: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”
The 19 breaks, case by case
Every case from the 2020 through 2024 terms in which at least four of the other five Republican appointees voted together and the Chief Justice did not, oldest first.
Joined Sotomayor’s majority, with Kavanaugh and the liberals: the Railroad Retirement Board’s refusal to reopen a benefits decision is a final decision, and so reviewable.
His one solo dissent in twenty terms: a plaintiff seeking a single dollar for a completed injury has no live case, and the Court “sees no problem with turning judges into advice columnists.”
Joined Kagan’s majority, same coalition: assignor estoppel survives, but only where the inventor’s attack on the patent contradicts what he represented in selling it.
Wrote separately in the S.B. 8 case, concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part, joined by all three liberals: “Texas has employed an array of stratagems designed to shield its unconstitutional law from judicial review.”
Joined the unsigned per curiam letting the healthcare-worker vaccination rule take effect — the same five, the week the Court blocked the larger workplace mandate.
Joined Breyer’s majority: by joining the Union the states accepted that their immunity yields to Congress’s power to raise armies, so a veteran may sue the state that would not rehire him.
Joined Kagan’s majority: a condemned prisoner may use an ordinary civil-rights suit to challenge his execution method even when the alternative is not authorized by state law.
Wrote the majority himself, with Kavanaugh and the liberals: the statute’s contiguous-territory return authority is discretionary, so rescinding the Migrant Protection Protocols broke no law.
Wrote the majority upholding the Voting Rights Act claim against Alabama’s map — declining the state’s invitation to rewrite the Gingles framework. Kavanaugh joined all but one part of it.
Joined Kagan’s dissent, the two of them alone against Sotomayor’s majority on fair use.
Joined Sotomayor’s majority: an Arizona rule read for the first time to bar this prisoner’s claim was too novel to be an adequate state ground.
Joined Kavanaugh’s dissent, with Sotomayor and Kagan: the Sackler releases were the best outcome available to the victims, and the Code’s catch-all bore the weight.
Joined Jackson’s majority: two states cannot enter a Rio Grande consent decree that disposes of the United States’ own claims without its consent.
Wrote the majority, with Gorsuch and the liberals: the Indian Health Service must pay the contract-support costs a tribe incurs running the programs it took over.
Joined Kavanaugh’s majority: a state cannot use its own exhaustion rule to bar a federal claim when the complaint is that the process is being delayed.
Joined Gorsuch’s majority: a filing deadline that falls on a weekend runs to the next business day, as deadlines long have.
Joined the parts of Jackson’s opinion that commanded a Court: a vacated sentence has not “been imposed,” so First Step Act minimums govern the resentencing.
Wrote the majority, with Gorsuch and the liberals: when exhaustion and the merits intertwine, the Prison Litigation Reform Act does not take the question from the jury.
Joined Gorsuch’s dissent, the two of them alone: the Clean Air Act sends locally applicable actions to the regional circuits.
Questions
Is John Roberts a conservative?
Yes, and the career record says so plainly: 41.9% of his votes since 2005 are coded liberal against 49.4% for the colleagues who heard the same cases, ranking him 24th most liberal of the 33 justices rankable since 1946 — the conservative half of the table, though above Gorsuch, Thomas and Alito. What complicates the label is not his votes but his position: he leaves his own bloc more often than every member of it except Thomas and Gorsuch, and when he does he is usually building the majority that wins.
How often is the Chief Justice in the majority?
More than anyone, in most terms. Across his whole tenure he has been outside the majority in 9.4% of his votes against 18.2% for the justices sitting on those same cases. SCOTUSblog's counts have him leading the Court at 95% in the 2024 term and about 96% in 2023, and tied with Kavanaugh at 95% in 2025.
Does Roberts side with the liberal justices?
19 times in 124 chances across the 2020 through 2024 terms — and 14 of those 19 were majorities, not dissents. He is the Court's most frequent builder of cross-bloc coalitions: one study counts twelve cross-bloc 5–4 majorities since Jackson joined and calls him “the current court’s central majority builder.” He rarely does it alone: Kavanaugh came with him 11 times and Gorsuch 5.
Has John Roberts ever dissented alone?
Once in twenty terms: Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski in 2021, an 8–1 case about whether a claim for one dollar in nominal damages keeps a lawsuit alive. “Because I would place a higher value on Article III, I respectfully dissent.” He is not counting separate dissenting opinions there — by this site's measure, the number of cases in which he was the only justice in the minority, it is 1.
What is John Roberts's judicial philosophy?
He gave the metaphor at his 2005 confirmation: “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them… Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.” In practice the through-line is narrowness — his Dobbs concurrence put it as “a simple yet fundamental principle of judicial restraint: If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more” — and an institutional concern for the Court itself, as in his 2018 answer to a president: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”
How this page is made
Every count comes from the Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.), justice-centered, 2025 Release 01 (how the voting figures are made), and every case links to its opinion. The four-of-five threshold matters more here than on any other page and is stated above rather than buried: in eleven of these nineteen Kavanaugh crossed with him and in five Gorsuch did, so requiring all five of the others to hold together would have erased most of the Chief Justice’s record of building cross-bloc majorities — which is the thing worth measuring. Two coding notes: the database records no ideological direction for Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado, and it treats Biden v. Missouri, an unsigned emergency-application ruling, like any other divided decision.
“Dissented alone” here means the case had exactly one justice in the minority — the measure used on every page of this series. By a looser definition, counting dissenting opinions no colleague joined, one scholar counts four for the Chief Justice. Outside figures: term majority rates from the SCOTUSblog stat packs and Empirical SCOTUS reviews (95% in the 2024 term, tied with Kavanaugh at 95% in 2025); the cross-bloc majority count and “central majority builder” from Adam Feldman (SCOTUSblog, 2026). Quotations: his 2005 confirmation statement, his 2018 statement to the Associated Press, his Dobbs concurrence, and his opinions in Uzuegbunam and Whole Woman’s Health. Case notes were checked against the slip opinions at supremecourt.gov.