WASHINGTON — He is the son of a company man, and he has lived a loyalist's life. His teachers remember him as the brightest of boys, but his classmates say he never lorded it over them. He was always conservative, but not doctrinaire. He was raised and remains a devout Roman Catholic who declines, friends say, to wear his faith on his sleeve.
And like his first judicial mentor, the late Henry J. Friendly of the federal appeals court in New York, John G. Roberts is an erudite, Harvard-trained, Republican corporate lawyer-turned-judge, with a punctilious, pragmatic view of the law.
"I do not have an all-encompassing approach to constitutional interpretation; the appropriate approach depends to some degree on the specific provision at issue," Roberts wrote in response to a written question during his 2003 confirmation to his current post on the federal appeals court in Washington in 2003. "Some provisions of the Constitution provide considerable guidance on how they should be construed; others are less precise.
"I would not hew to a particular 'school' of interpretation," he added, "but would follow the approach or approaches that seemed most suited in the particular case to correctly discerning the meaning of the provision at issue."
From his childhood as the son of a plant manager for Bethlehem Steel and a standout student at his Catholic high school through his career as a judge and lawyer for the government and private corporations, friends, colleagues and teachers say Roberts has taken life one step — and one case — at a time.
Laurence H. Tribe, a liberal professor of constitutional law at Harvard, remembers Roberts as a student there and has kept in touch with him over the years. He does not recall Roberts as a political conservative when he studied there.
"He's conservative in manner and conservative in approach," Tribe said. "He's a person who is cautious and careful, that's true. But he is also someone quite deeply immersed in the law, and he loves it. He believes in it as a discipline and pursues it in principle and not by way of politics."
In his 2003 written testimony, Roberts cited Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis D. Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, Robert H. Jackson and John Marshall as among the Supreme Court judges he most admired.
Roberts' friends say his approach to the rest of his life is comparable.
"When I look at the people who were his friends, and who are his friends, there's not a political component to it that I can detect," said Charles E. Davidow, another law school classmate who roomed with him when they were both clerking, for separate judges, in New York.
"It's not as if his friends are all conservative, or all liberal, or all anything else. His friends are his friends, and he's not the kind of personality where conversations with him tend to turn political."
In a law school class that included one current senator, Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and one former one, Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., at least two congressmen and countless managing partners of the nation's leading law firms, Roberts always stood out, but not apart. Though he earned more than $1 million a year by the time he left the blue-chip Washington law firm of Hogan & Hartson to go on the bench two years ago, he often ate lunch in the firm cafeteria, chatting with co-workers and junior colleagues.
Paul Mogin was a year behind Roberts at Harvard Law School, his roommate there for two years, followed him as Friendly's clerk on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and chose him as the best man at his wedding.
"By temperament, he's not a flame-thrower, not somebody you'd expect to willingly or readily overrule a precedent," Mogin said. "He's somebody who has respect for institutions. I think institutions have been important to him in his life, like Harvard, the Catholic Church and the Supreme Court. He's not likely to be anybody to do anything too radical."
Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Roberts arrived in Long Beach, Ind., a flag-bedecked town of 1,500 residents on the shore of Lake Michigan, around fourth grade, with his parents, John Sr. and Rosemary, when John Sr. helped open the Bethlehem Steel mill in Burns Harbor, a half-hour's drive away.
John Roberts had attended Catholic schools, first next door to his family's parish at Notre Dame, and then to an all-boys boarding school, La Lumiere, a bucolic retreat on a pond in nearby LaPorte.
He impressed almost everyone. Lawrence Sullivan, his high school math teacher, recalled Wednesday, "It became very, very clear and evident when he first came here that he was a person who was destined to do big things."
"He just ate up everything you gave him," Sullivan said. "Just his thirst for learning. He went far beyond what was expected for students."
Though Roberts at first aspired to be a history professor — a former roommate said he chose Harvard over Amherst intending to combine undergraduate work with a Ph.D. — he showed early signs of the skills that would serve him so well as a litigator.
"The English teacher used to talk about his papers after he had written them because they were outrageous but very well-crafted," remembered John Langley, an emergency room doctor in New Orleans who was a class below Roberts at La Lumiere. "He could take an argument that was borderline absurd and argue for it so well that you were almost at the point of having to accept his stance even though it was intuitively obvious that it was absurd."
Few people remember him or his parents having much interest in political activity, though Sullivan said "he had a conservative bent," in contrast to the La Lumiere faculty.
During the summers, John Roberts and John Langley worked at the Burns Harbor mill — on the floor, not in offices, like their fathers.
"They were down and dirty jobs but they paid well, and the kids had to learn how to take a riding from the regular employees who were not going to college," recalled Langley's mother, Joan.
Roberts graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1976 and entered Harvard Law School that fall.
By all accounts, during his Harvard years, Roberts excelled academically but also stood out for his even-tempered nature and ability to engage with people with many different viewpoints. Many of his law school classmates were aware that Roberts was somewhat conservative in outlook, but, they say, he was not politically active or aggressive.
"He was, I would say, conservative in the old-fashioned sense, not the new modern sense," said Bill Kayatta, a lifelong Democrat who served on the law review with Roberts. "He had a sort of thoughtful respect for institutions, history, precedent, a willingness to consider change but not revolutionary. He believed in having some humility about one's ability to suddenly decree that those who came before you were wrong, but he was not a stick in the mud, either."
Stephen Galebach, now a lawyer in Andover, Mass., who described himself as a "Reaganite conservative," recalled that he was more politically outspoken than Roberts ever was on campus. "From our time in law review, it wasn't like John was a gung-ho conservative," he said. "He wasn't active. He wasn't a gung-ho liberal on liberal causes. He was always more focused more on the craftsmanship" of the law.
After graduation, Roberts went to clerk for Friendly, the former presiding judge of the appeals court in New York who by then had shifted to senior status but was still widely regarded as the pre-eminent appeals court judge of his era.
Roberts' then had a clerkship for a more conservative judge, William H. Rehnquist, then an associate justice of the Supreme Court, before joining the Reagan administration as an aide to Attorney General William French Smith.
Roberts later worked as an associate in the White House counsel's office in the Reagan administration, before entering private practice at Hogan & Hartson in 1986., He then returned to government service as principal deputy solicitor general in the first Bush administration, helping to argue its positions before the Supreme Court. In 1991, he signed a brief asking the court to lower the wall of separation between church and state.
The government asked the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court ruling that it was impermissible for a clergyman to give an official address at a junior high school graduation in Providence, R.I., by discarding an earlier test and ruling that "civic acknowledgments of religion in public life do not offend the establishment clause," of the Constitution "as long as they neither threaten the establishment of an official religion nor coerce participation in religious activities." The court voted 5-4 against the administration and upheld the lower court.
Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a group that is heavily involved in litigation in this area, said Wednesday that Roberts' participation in the case made him "unsuited for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court." He said that if confirmed to the court, Roberts would "open the door to majority rule on religious matters."
In his previous confirmation hearings, Roberts argued that it was unfair to attribute to a lawyer the positions argued on behalf of a client.
Friends of Roberts and his wife, Jane, say they share a strong faith. "They are deeply religious," said Fred Fielding, the former White House counsel for President Reagan, "but they don't wear it on their sleeves at all."
The Robertses are members of the Church of the Little Flower in Bethesda, Md., a Catholic congregation that includes about 1,500 families.
The church, said Gary R. Davies,a deacon, is not particularly political, though it does organize two or so busloads of members each year who participate in an anti-abortion rally marking the Roe v. Wade decision. "When we gather together in the church, it is strictly for God's sake," he said. "I have never heard anyone one talk about politics. It just does not belong."
Some who know Roberts say he does not let his personal beliefs affect his legal views.
"He's not going to allow political or theological interference with his opinions," said Mark Touhey, a partner in the Texas-based law firm of Vinson & Elkins who knows Roberts professionally and socially.
Shannen W. Coffin, a friend of Roberts and a former Justice Department lawyer who attended the same Catholic church with him, said: "John's faith is his faith and his approach to the law is a separate issue. If it has any effect, it is in the sense of restraint, that he is not and the role of the judge is not to be the center of the universe. It stems from the sort of humility of a faithful person."
The Robertses frequently attend events at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Mass. Jane Sullivan Roberts is a graduate of the school, and has been a trustee of for the last four years. "They are devout Catholics," said Rev. Michael C. McFarland, the college president. "They are not the kind of people who would be in your face," he added. Their religion "would affect their personal lives but they are very professional in their work."
In his confirmation testimony two years ago, Roberts said that judges should be "ever mindful that they are insulated from democratic pressures precisely because the Framers expected them to be discerning law, not shaping policy," and added: "That means that judges should not look to their own personal views or preferences in deciding the cases before them. Their commission is no license to impose their preferences from the bench."