An Invisible Chief Justice

by Linda Greenhouse

New York Times
September 9, 2010

The Pew Research Center asked people this summer to identify the current chief justice of the United States from among four possibilities: John Roberts, Thurgood Marshall, John Paul Stevens and Harry Reid. Only 28 percent correctly picked Chief Justice Roberts. The late Thurgood Marshall came in second, with 8 percent. Fifty-three percent could not make a selection, answering “don’t know.”

The result was surprising; after all, people weren’t asked to pull a name out of thin air. And the alternatives to the real chief justice were scarcely plausible: Justice Thurgood Marshall died 17 years ago (or maybe people thought the question referred to Chief Justice John Marshall — he died in 1835); Senator Harry Reid has never been a justice at all; and Justice John Paul Stevens was prominently in the news this summer not for being chief justice, but for retiring.

To anyone who spends a few minutes a week thinking about the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is far from invisible. Political scientists and legal scholars debate whether the court under his leadership has become a whole lot more conservative or scarcely more conservative at all. A Roberts court decision earlier this year, the Citizens United campaign-finance ruling, prompted President Obama to criticize the chief justice and his colleagues to their faces in the middle of the State of the Union speech. And an unusually rapid pace of personnel change, with three additional new justices since Chief Justice Roberts took his seat on Sept. 29, 2005, has kept the court and its members under a brighter than usual spotlight. So the chief justice’s low public profile is a bit of a mystery.

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