Note to Chief Justice

Today is your Name Day. (This is a custom celebrated in many countries, though largely unknown in America.)

Saint John Roberts (1575-6 – 10 December 1610), was a Benedictine monk and priest, and was the first Prior of St. Gregory’s, Douai, France (now Downside Abbey). Returning to England as a missionary priest during the period of recusancy, he was martyred at Tyburn.

Why was he martyred? For faithfully and persistently practicing what he was….a priestly minister.

On 5 December he was tried and found guilty under the Act forbidding priests to minister in England, and on 10 December was hanged, drawn, and quartered with Thomas Somers at Tyburn.

Interesting….he studied law at the Inns of Court.

I’ve been reading law blogs recently that sound either surprised or frustrated that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts so persistently practices law according to…his belief in the rule of law. They consider him an ideologue.

He knows what they’re saying. This profile of Roberts is more complete and fair than those blogs. Jeffrey Rosen interviewed him for a book on the Court. He brought out facts of the Roberts Court that some bloggers (and Court watchers) selective leave out.

When I met with Roberts, the question of judicial temperament was much on his mind, since he had made it a priority of his first term to promote unanimity and collegiality on the Court. He was surprisingly successful in this goal: under his leadership, the Court issued more consecutive unanimous opinions than at any other time in recent history. But the term ended in what Justice John Paul Stevens called a “cacophony” of discordant voices. Opposing justices addressed each other in unusually personal terms and generated a flurry of stories in the media about the divisions on the Court, especially in cases involving terrorism, the death penalty, and gerrymandering.

Roberts seemed frustrated by the degree to which the media focused on the handful of divisive cases rather than on the greater number of unanimous ones, and also by the degree to which some of his colleagues were acting more like law professors than members of a collegial Court. As a result, Roberts looked to the example of his greatest predecessor—Marshall, who served as chief justice from 1801 to 1835—for a model of how to rein in a group of unruly prima donnas.

He might ask for some intercessory aid from his namesake, too.