The Chief the Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts Book Review

An insider'south look at the reign-in-progress of the Supreme Court's meridian judge.

The veteran Supreme Courtroom reporter Joan Biskupic opens The Master, her long-awaited biography of Chief Justice John Roberts, by describing him equally "difficult-wired from birth for success." By fortunate happenstance, Biskupic discovered during her research the evidence to perfectly embody the appetite that took Roberts from being the smartest boy in his class to presiding in the elevation position in the federal judiciary.

At age 13, Roberts applied to a prestigious Catholic preparatory school with a letter written in elegant cursive that ended with his promise to "go the best job past getting the best didactics." Once enrolled, Roberts excelled at the school, which later posted his application letter equally a bays of sorts.

Over the side by side 30 years, he connected to excel in uninterrupted succession at Harvard Higher, Harvard Police force School, two prestigious judicial clerkships, and a stellar career as Supreme Court advocate in the solicitor general's office and in private practice.

Biskupic, a friend and colleague for 30 years, is both charmed and awed by Roberts, who granted her more than twenty hours of off-the-record interviews. She exploits her extraordinary access and three decades of Supreme Court reportage and analysis to provide, as she did in three previous Supreme Courtroom biographies, intimate insight into her subject'due south persona and illuminating (if thinly sourced) scuttlebutt well-nigh Roberts' less-than-perfect relations with his colleagues.

In her subtitle, Biskupic promises an account of Roberts' "life and turbulent times," simply the business relationship makes clear that Roberts has been untouched and largely unaffected by the turbulences of his determinative years.

His namesake father was a white-neckband plant manager for Bethlehem Steel when the company and its spousal relationship were found to have violated federal civil rights law through hiring and promotion practices that disadvantaged African-American applicants and employees.

As a lawyer and approximate, Roberts has argued and ruled against racial remedies aimed at combating historic and present-twenty-four hours discrimination against African Americans.

Biskupic traces Roberts' political conservatism at least as far back as his days as a Harvard undergraduate in the last years of the Vietnam State of war. Roberts was "not apolitical," but he generally avoided involvement in the issues of the twenty-four hour period. He was put off by some of the anti-war protests and seemingly uninterested in the era's other historic movements: civil rights, women'south rights, and gay rights.

To this day, Roberts declines in interviews to try to explicate his fixed view against racial remedies, as seen in his decision-making stance in the 5-4 decision in his second term every bit chief justice to limit schoolhouse districts' ability to engineer racial diversity in educatee assignments.

Information technology was in that conclusion that Roberts famously reduced his civil rights jurisprudence to a single judgement: "The mode to stop discriminating on race is to stop discriminating on race," he wrote. Vii years afterward, Justice Sonia Sotomayor threw that quote back at him in an acrid comment in some other civil-rights-related case.

Roberts reached the Supreme Court a decade-plus after the 1 and only setback in his star-blest career: when Senate Democrats blocked his 1992 nomination past President George H.W. Bush to the federal appeals courtroom for the District of Columbia. A decade afterwards, Bush-league 43 succeeded in getting Roberts confirmed to the DC Circuit and, four years later, chose him to succeed the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor.

Roberts charmed George Due west. Bush, according to Bush'south later account, though his conservative directorate, including Vice President Dick Cheney, were less impressed. Then, as luck would have information technology, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died, and Roberts was elevated pre-confirmation from associate justice-to-be to master-justice designate.

As first-amidst-equals chief, Roberts quickly instilled a "picayune more relaxed" atmosphere than prevailed nether Rehnquist, according to the courtroom's senior liberal justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

But interpersonal relations take not always been smooth. Roberts sharply rebuked Justice Stephen One thousand. Breyer during oral arguments in a 2017 case for asking counsel for outside-the-record information. The extended rebuke, recounted by Biskupic, came four years later on Roberts had himself injected outside-the-record voting information into oral arguments to buttress his eventual decision to gut the federal Voting Rights Act.

Biskupic quotes — and manifestly agrees with — the high praise bestowed on Roberts for his "tireless preparation" and "powers of persuasion." She also relates such mannerly episodes as immature Jack Roberts' prancing around the White House stage when his father was being introduced as the adjacent Supreme Court justice. Then, later his confirmation past the Senate, Jack asked, naively, "Daddy, exercise yous get a sword?"

Even without a sword, Roberts is hardly the "modest judge," the politically neutral umpire that he claimed to be during his Senate confirmation. Instead, equally Biskupic writes, Roberts "did not entirely shed his partisan thinking once he donned the black robe." Through 13 terms, Roberts has "successfully steered the law in America" by reversing liberal precedents and establishing new conservative benchmarks. Just, in the recent past, the courtroom's farther tilt to the correct has been paused by Roberts' unanticipated votes in two decisions to save Obamacare and past Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's occasional alignments with the liberal bloc in such decisions as the conclusion guaranteeing spousal relationship equality to same-sex couples.

Kennedy's retirement, combined with President Trump'due south appointment of two reliably conservative justices, now gives Roberts added influence for the foreseeable time to come. "The Court," Biskupic writes, "was now Roberts's in name and in reality." He sits now "at the determinative center of the law."

Barely halfway through his likely quarter-century tenure, Roberts worries already about his legacy. As the nation's 17th main justice, the smartest man in the room accepts that he volition not equal the great chief justice John Marshall. But he hopes to steer an often-fractured court through turbulent times deftly enough to avoid being likened to Marshall's discredited successor, Roger Taney.

Kenneth Jost is writer of Trending Toward #Justice and the annual serial Supreme Court Yearbook. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown Law Schoolhouse and has covered law and justice as reporter, editor, or columnist for more than xl years. His weblog is Jost on Justice.

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