Book Review: Joan Biskupic looks at John Roberts' drive to the top and his aim to shift both law and country to the right

​If you're reading this blog, you are very likely concerned about justice in Wisconsin, the country, and across the world. But you're probably also pretty busy. How do you choose which books about the justice system to read during your limited free time?

In a new series of posts, Wisconsin Justice Initiative founder and former executive director Gretchen Schuldt will help you out. An avid reader, she returns to the blog with book reviews so you can decide what's of interest to you and worth your time.

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The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts, by Joan Biskupic. Basic Books, 421 pages, 2019. 

John Roberts always was a grind.
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When he was just 13, he wrote to the headmaster of La Lumiere boarding school, the Catholic institution Roberts wanted to attend for high school.

“I’ve always wanted to stay ahead of the crowd, and I feel that the competition at La Lumiere will force me to work as hard as I can. …,” the future chief justice of the Supreme Court wrote. “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.” 

Roberts got into the elite Indiana school, worked hard, and graduated first in his class. He’s been at the top of things ever since, even becoming chief justice without ever serving a single day as an associate justice. Now he is using his seat on the high court to advance the powerful conservative legal movement that is changing American government and life.

Biskupic, in her highly readable account that, thankfully, does not get stuck in the weeds of legal technicalities, portrays Roberts as a youth and young man who drove himself hard all the way through Harvard Law School and beyond. 

At La Lumiere, his roommate said, Roberts “would be physically exhausted at the end of each evening from studying.”

As a Harvard undergrad, Biskupic writes, “He routinely stayed up past midnight, studying or writing papers until he was physically drained.” 

After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law, where he served as managing editor of the prestigious law review, Roberts clerked with the respected federal appellate Judge Henry Friendly and the very conservative Associate Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist. 

When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, Roberts was thrilled. When Reagan gave his 1981 inaugural address, Roberts later said, “I felt he was speaking directly to me.” 

With the help of Friendly and Ken Starr, then chief-of-staff in the U.S. attorney general’s office, Roberts landed a job in Reagan’s Department of Justice. (Starr’s reputation had not yet been battered by his multi-pronged investigation into President Bill Clinton.) There, Biskupic writes, Roberts solidified his anti-affirmative action views and came to believe that giving minorities preference aimed at remediating past discrimination was simply unconstitutional.

He also argued strongly in memos that the Voting Rights Act should be interpreted more narrowly than many in Congress wanted. Only discriminatory intent should be considered, he said; the effects of legislation and policies should not be factors. Such an effects test, he wrote, would create a right to “proportional racial representation” on governmental bodies at all levels.

“That contention was untrue,” Biskupic says. Roberts lost that battle. The 1982 Voting Rights Act extension got through Congress and was signed by Reagan. It created an effects test provision.

Roberts that same year moved to the White House counsel’s office, where he put in 70 to 80 hours a week, and then on to private practice, and then to the bench when he was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit by president George W. Bush. Bush tapped him as chief justice of the Supreme Court in 2005.

Since then, Roberts has built a consistently conservative record. He wrote the plurality decision in Parents Involved In Community Schools v Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), which struck down a tie-breaking racial factor in a school selection process.

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," Roberts (in)famously wrote. 

His diligent, years-long work to weaken the Voting Rights Act met with partial success in 2013, when the Court, in Shelby County v Holder, struck down a key provision of the 1965 law designed to protect citizens’ right to vote regardless of race. Roberts authored the majority opinion in Shelby.

(Most recently, in April of this year, Roberts joined the majority opinion in Louisiana v Callais, requiring that challengers under the Voting Rights Act provide proof that redistricting was done to deliberately provide minority voters with less opportunity because of their race and not for political considerations, such as partisan advantage. The Court, in effect, killed the effects test.) 

Roberts also voted with the majority in District of Columbia v Heller (2008), the decision finding that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ right to keep guns, even if those individuals are not connected to a militia. He concurred in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), which overturned 1973’s Roe v Wade, the decision recognizing constitutional protection of abortion rights for women. He also joined the majority in Citizens United v Federal Elections Commission (2010), a decision that cleared the way for much more corporate and outside money to flow into elections. He dissented in Obergefell v Hodges (2015), which granted same-sex couples the right to marry.

(Roberts also wrote the majority opinion in Trump v United States (2024), the decision giving  presidents broad immunity for crimes they commit while in office. Biskupic’s book was published before that decision.) 

On the bench, Biskupic writes, “Roberts had demonstrated two overriding—and often conflicting—priorities. One was institutional. He wanted high public regard for the Court as an independent branch separate from the other two and cordoned off from politics. The other derived from his interest in changing the Court’s role in racial, religious, and other social dilemmas.” 

Roberts, despite his major role in the Court’s resetting of the country’s legal trajectory, does not appear to be particularly popular among his fellow justices and court staff. 

“Roberts was naturally reticent and guarded, which made his colleagues wary of his motives,” Biskupic writes. “The wariness extended to the staff in some chambers who derisively referred to Roberts as ‘King John,’ because of the control he tried to exert throughout the building.” 

“Away from the public spotlight, Roberts, too, could lapse into a mocking tone or be dismissive of a colleague’s argument,” Biskupic says. “He made no secret to friends that he found individual associate justices annoying, demanding, or arrogant.”

One post-book-publication clue that Biskupic was correct in her read of Roberts’ low popularity came from Justice Clarence Thomas, who said in 2022 said that before Roberts’ reign, “We actually trusted each other. We may have been a dysfunctional family, but we were a family, and we loved it.”

That comment was widely seen as a direct shot at Roberts. 

Roberts, now 71, hasn’t given any signs that he expects to step down from the court soon. For the foreseeable future he may well remain where he is, at the top of the top Court, grinding away to the Right.

Biskupic's book is a valuable guide to Roberts' legal and personal development and, without too much legal jargon, to the profound impacts he has had and continues to have on the country. The Chief can help the general reader better understand just what the heck is going on these days at the Supreme Court.

Joan Biskupic is a CNN legal analyst and author, specializing in coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court. She has written books on John Roberts, Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Sonia Sotomayor. After The Chief issued, Biskupic authored Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court’s Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences, published in 2023.