Newspaper Article

Roberts' pitch more like a curveball, It's unfair for Supreme Court nominee to liken the job of a justice to that of an umpire because, unlike baseball, opinions of law can't be verified

SUSAN N. HERMAN. Susan N. Herman is a professor at Brooklyn Law School

2005

Overview

Another myth floating around the confirmation hearings held that [John G. Roberts] is a cipher and we do not know what kind of decisions he will make as a justice. Roberts has, of course, left a long paper trail of memos from his years of service within the government (not all of which have been released to the Senate). He says that these memos don't count because as a lawyer for the Reagan and Bush administrations, he was not necessarily expressing his own beliefs. This slate-wiping is too convenient and too broad. The briefs Roberts wrote for the government do indeed represent his clients' choice of position. But many of the memos Roberts wrote urged his employers to take more extreme positions to resist expansive enforcement of civil-rights laws, for example. In some memos, he certainly seemed to be writing in his own voice: \"I honestly find it troubling . . .\" The memos show that, as his colleague Bruce Fein said, he was one of an \"ideological band of brothers.\" Roberts contends that he can put aside his firmly held conservative views when he dons his judicial robes. I don't doubt that he intends to be open-minded, but I do doubt that he can or will shed his partiality. Kenneth Manning, a political scientist who has studied the 190 decisions Roberts has made so far as an appellate judge, concludes that his positions are \"very\" conservative on criminal justice matters (compared with other appellate judges, not exactly a liberal group), and \"exceptionally\" conservative in cases involving civil rights and civil liberties.

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