To many, he is a quiet conservative
Nominee's friends laud brilliant mind and humility
WASHINGTON -- John G. Roberts's path to the Supreme Court winds through a secluded Roman Catholic boarding school in Indiana to the top ranks of Harvard Law School to the gray government halls of Washington, where he linked up with a nascent conservative legal movement that would later come to dominate Republican Party politics.
Along the way, this Buffalo-born son of a steel company engineer earned a reputation as a man who is brilliant but self-deprecating, earnest but not humorless, conservative but not an ideologue. He also built up a powerful network of friends that includes Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, for whom he clerked, and a range of top legal minds.
''He was conservative by nature, quiet in temperament, and highly regarded for his intellect," said Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Ralph D. Gants, who worked under Roberts at the Harvard Law Review.
Roberts will go before the Senate Judiciary Committee next fall armed with a golden resume: Co-captain of the football team and top of his high school class, academic honors at Harvard College and Harvard Law School, associate counsel to President Reagan and deputy solicitor general to President George H.W. Bush, a lucrative private practice in which he walked up the marble steps dozens of times to argue cases before the Supreme Court, and a seat on federal appellate court in D.C. -- all by age 50.
But timing also brought him there: Roberts's three-decade career in Washington tracks the rise of conservative legal scholars, organized under the aegis of the Federalist Society, which provided the intellectual underpinning for the policies of Republican politicians, including President Bush. Like Justices Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas, Roberts is active in the Federalist Society.
Roberts's particular focus in the conservative movement is returning power to the states -- a cause beloved by those wary of the federal government but troublesome to supporters of civil rights and environmental regulations.
''My worst fear is that he joins with the extreme conservative faction of the court like Scalia, Thomas, and Rehnquist in basically continuing to cut back on some of the issues that I care about -- like affirmative action -- in addition to tribal rights," said Heather Kendall-Miller, who argued against Roberts in a case involving a Native American tribe in Alaska claiming the right to govern 2 million acres under federal law. Roberts, representing the State of Alaska, defeated the tribe in court.
Kendall-Miller said Roberts went out of his way to emphasize that he personally supported states' rights and wasn't just representing a client.
Still, even Kendall-Miller, like many who have gotten to know Roberts -- friends and classmates, colleagues and courtroom adversaries -- came away impressed by his professionalism.
''He is not an ideologue or a right-wing fundamentalist kind of guy, which we all feared Bush would nominate," said James McNaughton, a retired foreign service officer and a neighbor in Roberts's suburban Washington neighborhood. ''He's a very normal American dad -- maybe that's getting a little scarcer than it used to be."
Stellar student
Roberts was born in Buffalo, but moved to Long Beach, Ind., by the time he was in second grade. The lakefront town, now with a population of about 1,500, is about 30 miles from the steel capital of Gary, Ind., where his father took on an executive position at
By high school, it was clear that Roberts was going places. He boarded at La Lumiere School, an independent Catholic college preparatory school on 155 acres of rural hills in northwest Indiana, about half an hour's drive from his home. The school, founded by businessmen in 1963, is modest by East Coast standards, featuring squat brick buildings surrounding a dark, musty chapel. When Roberts attended, the school's 80 boys -- many whose fathers were also Bethlehem steel executives -- were required to dress in coats and ties for class.
No school activity seemed to escape Roberts's resume: He was co-captain of the football team, a wrestler, co-editor of the newspaper. He was involved in drama and chorus and was on the student council. He, along with four other boys, was bestowed the honorary title ''sacristan," a reference to the officer charged with the care of the church sacristy, for his moral leadership.
He graduated first in his class.
Lawrence Sullivan, a retired math teacher who taught Roberts for three years, said yesterday that the Supreme Court nominee was a stellar student who was eager to participate in class even though math was not among his favorite subjects.
''When you're around him you know that he's very intelligent, but he's not the sort of person who would ever lord it over people," Sullivan said.
'Humble' at Harvard
In 1973, Roberts entered Harvard, where he earned his undergraduate degree summa cum laude in three years and wrote his thesis on early British liberalism, according to William P. LaPiana, who was a tutor at Leverett House, where Roberts lived as an undergraduate.
Former classmates recall him as a conservative student in a liberal era, but not one to push his views onto others. He concentrated on his books and earned admission to Harvard Law School, where his high grades earned him an editorship at the Harvard Law Review. His peers later chose him to be managing editor.
Norman Ankers, a Detroit lawyer who was Roberts's classmate at the law school and later worked as co-counsel with Roberts in a civil litigation case, said Roberts was a brilliant student who didn't show off. ''We used to call them gunners, the ones who raise their hands in class all the time. John wasn't like that," Ankers said. ''He was unassuming and humble, even though he was probably the smartest guy in every class."
Ankers and classmate William J. Kayatta Jr., a partner at the Portland, Maine, firm of Pierce Atwood, said Roberts was not ideologically rigid. He said Roberts enjoyed arguments but never let them become personal. ''John is a conservative with a small 'c,' old-fashioned rather than a talk radio, cable TV conservative," Kayatta said.
The Harvard Law Review staff of the late 1970s was an overachieving bunch, even by Harvard standards. Roberts's classmates included David W. Leebron, president of Rice University in Houston; John Sexton, president of New York University; and Harold Koh, dean at Yale Law School.
Roberts's fellow members of the Class of 1979 also included Senator Russ Feingold, one of the Senate Judiciary Committee members who will be sitting in judgment of Roberts's nomination, and Robert D. Luskin, the attorney for White House adviser Karl Rove. In the Law Review photo, Luskin is sitting next to Jane Ginsburg, daughter of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In a telephone interview from Hong Kong, where he was traveling, Leebron said that in a class that produced some of the nation's leading scholars, Leebron always thought it was Roberts who was destined for the academy.
''If you asked me, of my class, who was most likely to be a legal academic, I would have picked John Roberts," Leebron said.
He approached politics with the same low-key Midwestern manner that he approached his studies.
In 1980, when Roberts watched the presidential election results with William J. Lazarus, a left-leaning classmate, Lazarus put a small donkey on the television set and Roberts put a plastic elephant beside it. ''He wasn't devoid of political preferences, but he didn't, and he doesn't, define his life by them," Lazarus said.
And when Roberts was sworn in as appellate judge in 2003, he selected three speakers: Rehnquist, Lazarus, and former Solicitor General Kenneth W. Starr, whom he once worked for. ''John doesn't pick his friends or those he admires based on politics," Lazarus said.
Career in bloom
After Harvard, Roberts moved to New York City, splitting an apartment with another classmate, Charles Davidow. They were ''a couple of naive law students" when it came to the cost of living in the city, Davidow said, but they picked up experience that would last a lifetime as they clerked for judges at the courthouse on Foley Square.
Roberts clerked for the widely respected US Circuit Judge Henry Friendly, who encouraged wide debate among his clerks. The following year Roberts was chosen to clerk for Rehnquist.
Rehnquist was just the first of many leading conservatives to take Roberts under his wing. Just two years out of law school, Roberts was named a special assistant to the US attorney general, and then an associate counsel to Reagan. From 1989 to 1993, he was the top deputy to Starr, who later became famous for his investigation into President Clinton.
Working with Starr, Roberts served as the government's counsel in some of the leading cases during the first Bush administration. Roberts represented the government in a case that allowed mining on certain federal lands, argued in favor of ending court oversight of a school desegregation case, wrote a brief in favor of allowing religious speech during a school graduation ceremony, and sought to limit the rights of prisoners.
Roberts also worked on several abortion cases, including one in which he said that Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, ''was wrongly decided and should be overruled." However, when Roberts was asked about that case during his 2003 nomination hearings, he said that Roe v. Wade was ''settled" law.
Donald Ayer, who served as deputy solicitor general before Roberts, cautioned that a position stated by the government's lawyer does not necessarily reflect his personal views. ''The government position ends up being dictated by the role of the government in the case," Ayer said.
Roberts caught the attention of the first President Bush, who in 1992 nominated him to an appeals court judgeship. But the nomination stalled, due in part to the hope by some Democrats that Bush would be defeated and a Democratic president might fill the seat. Roberts was deeply disappointed, his friends said.
As it turned out, the defeat helped lay the groundwork for his Supreme Court nomination. C. Boyden Gray, who was White House counsel during the 1992 nomination, said President Bush knew that Roberts had missed out on a judgeship during his father's administration.
The younger Bush sought to finish his father's business.
Judicial bonds
Hogan & Hartson bills itself as the biggest firm based in Washington, and it stands among a handful of elite firms exerting behind-the-scenes clout in the capital. Roberts began his career there during an interlude in his government service between 1986 and 1989. He rose to partner in an impressive two years, and even began arguing cases before the Supreme Court.
In 1993, after the disappointment of losing his appeals-court nomination, he returned to Hogan & Hartson, where he spent almost a decade representing a variety of corporate clients, including Chrysler, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and mining interests. He also was hired frequently to represent states seeking to sidestep federal regulations.
He represented Hawaii in its efforts to allow only native Hawaiians to elect officials to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, and defended Alaska's right to maintain an online registry of convicted sex offenders.
He also won an important decision on behalf of a
Robert Leslie Rosenbaum, a Lexington, Ky., lawyer who represented the fired autoworker, said he found Roberts to be ''a gentleman . . . I would have no problem with Judge Roberts sitting on the US Supreme Court."
In arguing before the Supreme Court, attorneys say, Roberts displays a personal rapport with several justices, probably no surprise given that he has argued 39 cases before the court as a government and private lawyer.
''It was clear there was a familiarity between him and the court, particularly with Rehnquist, in the tone in which he was addressed . . . and the friendly way in which a question was posed," said Darryl L. Thompson, an Anchorage lawyer who opposed Roberts in the 2002 sex-offenders registry case.
Thompson predicted Roberts's bond with Rehnquist will only be strengthened if Roberts joins the court. ''I don't think he's going to be an O'Connor swing type of a vote," added Thompson, who predicted Roberts would end up on the Rehnquist-Scalia-Thomas conservative wing.
Roberts's years in private practice left him wealthy but ready for a new challenge. In 2003, Bush nominated him for the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and he was confirmed on a voice vote -- indicating little opposition. His brief tenure is notable for the few clues it offers into his legal philosophy -- with some exceptions.
Shortly after joining the court in 2003, Roberts upheld the arrest of a 12-year-old girl for eating a french fry inside a Metrorail station in Washington. The girl's case, in which she was handcuffed and led away, provoked a national outcry.
Roberts bemoaned the over-the-top actions of the police, noting that the girl was ''frightened, embarrassed, and crying." Nevertheless, he upheld the action, saying the government had ''the legitimate goal of promoting parental awareness and involvement with children who commit delinquent acts."
Earlier this month, Roberts was one of three judges who unanimously decided that the Bush administration may restart its trials of detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison, though it offers defendants no right to see evidence or appeal their convictions to an independent panel.
Roberts is married to Jane Sullivan Roberts, a law partner in the firm of Shaw Pittman handling technology law cases. They have two children, Josephine, 5, and Jack, 4. She was formerly a board member and executive officer of Feminists for Life and has done legal work for the group, which opposes abortion and works in support of women with children.
The family lives in a pale-yellow brick home valued at more than $1 million that sits on a verdant, quiet street right off a main thoroughfare in the plush Washington suburb of Chevy Chase, Md.
''The Roberts family is just lovely -- they have spectacular children," said Tom Brault, a 37-year-old real estate consultant whose son plays with the Roberts children. ''It's reassuring" that Roberts was nominated to the high court, he added.
Jonathan Saltzman, Charlie Savage, Michael Kranish, and Susan Milligan of the Globe staff and correspondent Kaitlin Bell contributed to this report. 
