The Style of a Skeptic: The Opinions of Chief Justice Roberts
The Style of a Skeptic: The Opinions of Chief Justice Roberts
Laura Krugman Ray, 83 Ind. L.J. 997 (2008)
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In his court of appeals opinions, most of them unanimous rulings on relatively narrow issues of statutory interpretation, Roberts favors informal diction and a lightly ironic tone that tend to humanize otherwise dry institutional issues. He engages the reader through a range of strategies, from figurative language to syntactical asides, suggesting that even the technical subject of administrative law is rooted in human experience as well as regulatory doctrine. The Supreme Court docket has provided Roberts with a richer and more varied set of legal problems, and in his first term he seems at times to be feeling his way toward a voice that retains some of the conversational qualities of his earlier opinions while acknowledging the added dignity of the high court. It is principally in his dissents and concurrences that Roberts has expressed most fully his judicial personality, countering the majority’s abstract theories with his own perspective on law as a reflection of the realities of human experience.
This Article will analyze Roberts’s rhetorical choices, first in his court of appeals opinions and then in the opinions from his first Supreme Court term. That analysis reveals the new Chief Justice as a careful and detached stylist who favors experience over theory in his opinions and who locates himself as the heir to a distinguished tradition of judicial skepticism.