Where He Stands

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Last year Roberts dismissed a case brought by the mother of a 12-year-old girl who had been hauled off in handcuffs for eating a single French fry in the Washington Metro; she claimed her Fourth Amendment and equal-protection rights had been violated, in part because, under the law, an adult would only have received a citation from the police. Roberts has also come down consistently, most recently in a dissent last week, in favor of police searches and seizures that were arguably conducted without probable cause. Still, last year he ordered the resentencing of a man who was being treated more or less as an equal partner in crime largely because he had been aware that his wife had stolen computers and other items from her government office. Upcoming Cases: One features a Tennessee man on death row trying to win a new trial because of fresh, potentially exculpatory DNA evidence. Another centers on whether police can search a home when a squabbling husband and wife give different answers to officers' requests to do so.

EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE

One of the few really controversial rulings Roberts has joined as a federal judge came down earlier this month, when the court said that prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay are not protected by the Geneva Convention and can be tried by military commissions. Roberts dissented in 2003 when his own court refused to rehear Vice President Dick Cheney's appeal to keep secret records from the meetings of his energy task force. Cheney had argued that handing over such documents would violate executive privilege.

LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT

In one of his most famous cases as a corporate lawyer, Roberts represented Toyota and won a major victory for Big Business against the Americans with Disabilities Act, when the Supreme Court ruled that an assembly-line worker with carpal tunnel syndrome wasn't covered by the antidiscrimination law. Still, as a judge, Roberts has come down on the side of workers, ruling in favor of an employee who accused Washington's transit authority of having fired him because he suffers from bipolar disorder. He upheld the district court ruling because he said the transit authority received federal funds and thus was obliged to follow federal laws governing terminations. Upcoming Cases: One involves whether workers at meat-processing plants should be paid for the time it takes them to get to their work stations after they don nearly 10 lbs. of required protective gear.