I first met Chief Justice Roberts very early in his tenure (and, less importantly, mine)—when he came to the University of Miami School of Law for a public talk (and an ABC News interview) in November 2006.1 Roberts seemed to be, in at least some respects, a breath of fresh air. The same nine justices had sat together from Justice Breyer’s 1994 confirmation through Chief Justice Rehnquist’s death in September 2005 (the second-longest period of unbroken continuity in the Court’s history—and the longest since 1823). Here was a much younger, more vibrant, and publicly charming successor—who outwardly committed to working to build more consensus inside the Court, and to leading the Court not just toward moderation, but toward more public visibility (hence sitting down for an hour-long interview on national television). Perhaps the most widely remembered line from his confirmation hearing was his insistence that judges just call balls and strikes. But the more telling quote to me has always been his insistence that, “if it’s not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, in my view it is necessary not to decide more.”

The ensuing 20 years has featured a Court deciding quite a lot more than necessary—inserting itself into hot-button social issues earlier than necessary (if it was necessary at all); moving an array of previously settled statutory and constitutional understandings sharply to the right; and, over the past decade especially, running roughshod over all kinds of procedural norms that previously served to moderate many of the justices’ more extreme impulses—with its behavior on emergency applications just one of the many examples. (Last Monday’s grant of certiorari “before judgment” in Slaughter was the 23rd time the Court has thus leapfrogged a federal court of appeals since 2019; it hadn’t done it once in the previous 15 years).

It’s tempting to conclude that some of this shift happened despite the best efforts of Chief Justice Roberts, not because of them. This was the same Roberts, for instance, who switched his vote in 2012 to uphold the Affordable Care Act—the centerpiece of President Obama’s domestic agenda. It’s the same Roberts who, as the median vote between Justice Kennedy’s retirement in 2018 and Justice Barrett’s confirmation in 2020, voted against President Trump in a number of significant cases—including the Census case (in which he wrote for the Court and his vote was decisive); the DACA case (ditto); and the two subpoena cases (in which he wrote for both majorities). And it’s the same Roberts who, at least for a time, was most likely to split from the other Republican appointees when it came to abuses of the emergency docket—from COVID cases during the October 2020 Term to the Texas abortion case in September 2021 to the Alabama redistricting cases in February 2022. Indeed, Roberts dissented on the most important issue in Whole Woman’s Health, and concurred only in the judgment in Dobbs; he alone was willing to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, but not to otherwise overrule Roe or Casey.

But a very different Roberts had already made his presence felt by the end of his second term on the Court—when he wrote for the four-justice plurality in Parents Involved in 2007. When Justice Breyer’s oral dissent in that case pointedly complained that “It is not often in the law that so few have quickly changed so much,” he was directly blaming Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito—who replaced Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the middle of Roberts’s first term—for the Court’s rapid right-turn on desegregation.