“He was somebody who got along with everyone, who was obviously very bright but not aggressive,” Rowe, who is also a Crimson editor, said earlier this month. “He had a Midwestern reserve about not showing off how smart he was.”
Rowe added that the students on the Law Review always thought of Roberts as fair, especially on politically divisive issues. “There was a certain amount of left versus right, but John was someone that everyone could talk to and respected.”
“I never thought of him as an ideologue,” Lindsay A. Connor, who was also on the Law Review with Roberts, wrote in an e-mail two weeks ago. However Connor said that he does not know how Roberts has changed since he left Harvard 26 years ago.
One colleague said that even during his time on the Law Review, Roberts was on the conservative side of the political spectrum.
Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law David B. Wilkins ’77 said earlier this month that Roberts was “more conservative than the typical Harvard Law student in the 1970s.” However, Wilkins said that today’s political climate is very different from that of the mid-seventies.
“90 percent of the Harvard Law School class is more conservative than the typical Harvard Law student in the 1970s,” he said.
FROM THE BAR TO THE BENCH
After graduating from HLS, Roberts went to Washington, where he clerked for William H. Rehnquist, who at the time was an associate justice on the Supreme Court,
Roberts later worked in the offices of the Attorney General and the White House Counsel, in addition to serving as Principal Deputy Solicitor General under Kenneth W. Starr in the first Bush Administration.
In between stints with the government, Roberts worked at the law firm Hogan & Hartson, where he established himself as a top appellate lawyer with an impressive record—he has argued a total of 39 cases before the Supreme Court, winning 25 of them.
Bush nominated him to the D.C. Circuit Court in January 2003. It was the third nomination for Roberts, who had previously been nominated to that court by both Bushes. The third time proved the charm—Roberts was confirmed in May, 2003.
Roberts’ circuit court confirmation hearings were highlighted by glowing accounts of Roberts’ skills as a jurist.
The American Bar Association gave him the rating of “Well Qualified” without reservation, the highest possible mark for a jurist.
A bipartisan group of 156 members of the D.C. Bar also sent a letter encouraging the Judiciary Committee to approve Roberts.
“He is one of the very best and most highly respected appellate lawyers in the nation, with a deserved reputation as a brilliant writer and oral advocate,” the letter said. “He is also a wonderful professional colleague both because of his enormous skills and because of his unquestioned integrity and fair-mindedness.”
“In my view...there is no better appellate advocate than John Roberts,” Walter E. Dellinger, III, who served as Solicitor General under President Bill Clinton, told the Judiciary Committee.
—Staff writer Adam M. Guren can be reached at guren@fas.harvard.edu.