“Ninety 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 Rehnquist, who at the time was an associate justice on the Supreme Court. He also clerked for Circuit Judge Henry Friendly, a well known jurist with a non-ideological reputation and to whom Roberts is often compared.
Roberts later worked in the offices of the Attorney General and the White House Counsel during the Reagan administration, 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 President Bush and his father. 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 in 2003 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 former President Bill Clinton, told the Judiciary Committee.
—Staff writer Adam M. Guren can be reached at guren@fas.harvard.edu.