Ghosts of Old Cases Moving Roberts Left?

Two cases may have contributed to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Robert’s apparent shift to the left over the last two years, Adam Winkler suggests in Slate: the first for causing a tectonic shift in U.S. politics, the other for undoubtedly shaking Roberts’ personal conviction. The outcome of Citizens United in 2010 opened up the floodgates for an enormous amount of money to be infused into politics, far from the “small, incremental steps” Roberts claimed to prefer when altering existing doctrine. Roberts may have wanted a narrower ruling in that case, but went along with the broad final decision his fellow conservative justices reached. Then another from Roberts’ first term on the Court, a capital punishment case in which Roberts asserted the guilt of a man who was later exonerated on DNA evidence. It was “the type of case that should cause any justice to second-guess his or her own intuitions and judgments,” Winkler says.