Chief Justice John Roberts has led the Supreme Court of the United States since September 29, 2005, when he was confirmed by a Senate vote of 78–22 after being nominated by President George W. Bush to succeed the late William Rehnquist.1Supreme Court of the United States. Biographies of Current Justices2U.S. Senate. U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 109th Congress – 1st Session He is the seventeenth person to hold the office and the longest-serving member of the current bench. In two decades at the Court’s center, he has authored opinions that reshaped healthcare law, voting rights, affirmative action, presidential immunity, and the power of federal agencies.
What the Chief Justice Actually Does
The Chief Justice is one of nine justices, with no extra vote. The additional authority comes from the surrounding duties. During oral arguments, Roberts presides over the courtroom and controls the questioning. In the private conferences where the justices discuss cases, he leads the discussion and speaks first. When he votes with the majority, he decides who writes the opinion, which shapes how broadly or narrowly a ruling reads.
Outside the courtroom, he heads the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policymaking body for the entire federal court system.3United States Courts. About the Judicial Conference of the United States He issues an annual Year-End Report on the state of the federal judiciary, which has become a platform for flagging priorities such as judicial security and courthouse funding.4Supreme Court of the United States. Chief Justice’s Year-End Reports on the Federal Judiciary The Constitution assigns him one more job: presiding over any Senate impeachment trial of a sitting President.5Constitution Annotated. Article I Section 3 – Senate – Section: Clause 6 Impeachment Trials
How He Approaches a Case
At his 2005 confirmation hearings, Roberts offered the line that still follows him: a judge is like a baseball umpire, calling balls and strikes rather than writing the rules. The analogy captured a real tendency. He prefers deciding cases on the narrowest grounds available and resolving the specific dispute without reaching further than necessary. Scholars call this judicial minimalism.
He pairs that instinct with heavy respect for stare decisis, the principle that courts should respect their own prior decisions. His concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is the clearest illustration. Five justices voted to overturn Roe v. Wade outright. Roberts wrote separately to say he would have upheld Mississippi’s fifteen-week abortion ban without dismantling the underlying right, calling the majority’s approach “a serious jolt to the legal system” and arguing that a narrower ruling “would be markedly less unsettling, and nothing more is needed to decide this case.”6Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 US (2022) That position lost, but it captured a core Roberts belief: stability and public confidence in the Court matter alongside getting to the “right” answer.
The Opinions That Define His Tenure
Saving the Affordable Care Act, Twice
No cases define Roberts’ early years quite like the Affordable Care Act litigation. In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012), he wrote the majority opinion addressing the law’s individual mandate. He concluded that Congress could not force people to buy insurance under the Commerce Clause, which regulates existing economic activity rather than compelling it. But he found that the penalty functioned as a tax and was therefore a valid exercise of Congress’s taxing power, allowing the law to survive.7Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 US 519 (2012)
Three years later, King v. Burwell challenged whether the ACA’s tax credits were available in states using the federal exchange rather than their own. Roberts again wrote for the majority, holding that the phrase “Exchange established by the State” was ambiguous in context and that Congress clearly intended for the credits to apply nationwide. Stripping subsidies from federal exchange states, he reasoned, would trigger the “death spirals” the law was designed to prevent.8Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. King v. Burwell, 576 US 473 (2015)
Voting Rights and Race in Admissions
In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Roberts wrote the majority opinion striking down the coverage formula in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the provision that identified which states and counties needed federal approval before changing voting rules. He concluded that the formula relied on decades-old data and could no longer justify treating some states differently from others. Because Section 5’s preclearance requirement depended on that formula, the ruling effectively suspended federal oversight of election changes in previously covered jurisdictions.9Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Shelby County v. Holder, 570 US 529 (2013)10Department of Justice. Section 4 Of The Voting Rights Act Congress has not passed a new formula since.
A decade later, he wrote the majority in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023), ending race-conscious admissions at colleges and universities. The Court held that the admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause because they lacked measurable objectives, used race as a negative factor, and had no meaningful endpoint. Roberts wrote that universities could still consider how race affected an individual applicant’s life story, but could not use race itself as a category.11Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 US (2023)
Presidential Immunity
In Trump v. United States (2024), Roberts authored a majority opinion that broke new ground on whether a former president can face criminal prosecution. The Court held that a former president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his core constitutional powers, presumptive immunity for all other official acts, and no immunity at all for unofficial conduct. Under the presumptive immunity standard, the government would need to show that prosecuting a specific official act would not intrude on the authority and functioning of the executive branch.12Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Trump v. United States, 603 US (2024) The liberal justices dissented sharply, arguing the decision placed presidents above the law. Roberts framed it as a structural requirement of the separation of powers.
Reining In Federal Agencies
Two recent Roberts opinions reshaped the relationship between federal agencies and the courts that review their work. In West Virginia v. EPA (2022), he wrote for a six-justice majority holding that the Environmental Protection Agency had exceeded its authority by adopting a sweeping plan to shift the nation’s electricity generation away from coal. The opinion formally adopted what scholars call the major questions doctrine: when an agency claims the power to make a decision of vast economic and political significance, it must point to clear authorization from Congress.13Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, 597 US (2022)
Two years later, Roberts authored the majority in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), overruling the forty-year-old Chevron doctrine. Under Chevron, courts had been required to defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. Loper Bright held that the Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise their own independent judgment about what a statute means. Roberts wrote that courts can still look to agency expertise for guidance, what older case law calls Skidmore deference, but can no longer treat the agency as the final word on statutory meaning.14Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 US (2024)
Citizens United
Roberts joined the 2010 majority in Citizens United v. FEC, which held that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent political spending by corporations. The ruling struck down a federal ban on corporate-funded political broadcasts near elections, overruling earlier precedent that had allowed such restrictions. Roberts wrote a concurrence emphasizing that free speech protections apply regardless of whether the speaker is an individual or a corporate entity.15Legal Information Institute. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission The decision opened the door to the super PAC era.
The Institutionalist Streak
Roberts has crossed ideological lines in cases where he appears to view the Court’s institutional credibility as being on the line. He saved the Affordable Care Act twice. In Department of Commerce v. New York, he blocked the Trump administration from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census, writing that the government’s stated justification was “more of a distraction” than a genuine explanation for the decision.16Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Department of Commerce v. New York, 588 US (2019)
This does not make him a moderate in any conventional sense. He authored the opinions gutting the Voting Rights Act’s coverage formula, ending affirmative action in higher education, and recognizing presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. But he has shown a willingness to absorb criticism from his own ideological allies when he thinks a ruling would go too far too fast. The Dobbs concurrence remains the starkest example: he voted to uphold Mississippi’s abortion ban but refused to join the majority in overturning Roe entirely, warning about the damage a sudden reversal would inflict on the Court’s legitimacy.
The Emergency Docket
A growing share of the Roberts Court’s most consequential work has come not through full briefing and oral argument but through the emergency docket, sometimes called the shadow docket. These orders are issued on an expedited timeline, often within days of an application being filed, with limited briefing and frequently without signed opinions explaining the Court’s reasoning. Roberts has shown discomfort with how aggressively the Court’s conservative majority has used this channel. He has joined the liberal justices in dissenting from certain emergency orders, criticizing the majority for granting extraordinary relief without adequate justification.
The Court’s First Ethics Code
For most of its history, the Supreme Court operated without a formal code of ethics. In November 2023, under growing public criticism over undisclosed gifts, travel, and financial relationships involving several justices, the Court adopted its first-ever Code of Conduct for Justices. The accompanying statement acknowledged that the absence of a written code “has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.”17Supreme Court of the United States. Code of Conduct for Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States
The code establishes five canons requiring justices to uphold the judiciary’s integrity and independence, avoid the appearance of impropriety, perform their duties impartially, limit extrajudicial activities that conflict with their office, and refrain from political activity. It also includes provisions on disqualification and financial conduct. Critics have noted that the code lacks an enforcement mechanism: there is no body with the authority to investigate or sanction a sitting justice for violations. Congress has introduced various proposals for external oversight, but none have been enacted.