5 Things You Need to Know About Roberts

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1. Among the central questions Roberts will be asked to address is how he views a Justice's role: How does he perceive the court's power, and how much does he respect its past decisions? In his responses last month to a Judiciary Committee questionnaire, he invoked the values of modesty and humility seven times in an eight-paragraph response, as in "a judge must have the humility to be fully open to the views of his fellow judges." As for precedent, Roberts affirmed that it "plays an important role in promoting the stability of the legal system." If nothing else, that was politically shrewd, since it heartened liberals, who felt he wouldn't set out to unravel every regulation of the past 30 years, but also conservatives, who felt reassured that he wouldn't use a seat on the bench to confect a constitutional right to gay marriage.

Judges, Roberts noted on his Senate questionnaire, "do not have a commission to solve society's problems." He has held that view since his earliest days in government. Old memos show that as a Reagan Administration lawyer, he ardently opposed judicial meddling in divisive issues he thought were best left to lawmakers. He even wrote that Congress had the power to strip the Supreme Court of its right to hear cases that involved social issues like school prayer and abortion. When Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1983 complained of the court's heavy workload, Roberts wrote a sizzling memo, observing, "So long as the court views itself as ultimately responsible for governing all aspects of our society, it will, understandably, be overworked."

But modesty, like activism, is in the eye of the beholder. What the Democrats want to know is how he would treat past efforts by the court to right social wrongs, whether by busing students to foster desegregation or banning the execution of people under age 18. Would he "humbly" respect those earlier decisions or overturn them as examples of judicial excess? When he talked about the lump he gets in his throat as he walks up the court's marble steps, it suggested he is not interested in burning the place down. But the tone of some early memos, like one in which he approved of Education Secretary Bill Bennett's attacks on the court for its "hostility to religion," suggests his respect is not absolute. He even supported term limits for federal judges so they "would not lose all touch with reality through decades of ivory tower existence."

"THE SO-CALLED 'RIGHT TO PRIVACY' ..."