Word: chief
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According to Scalia, Roberts has used his power to assign opinions when he's in the majority to encourage his colleagues to write narrow decisions that Justices on both sides can accept. "The chief may say, 'Why don't you come along with a very narrow opinion? We can get seven votes for that, and it will look a lot better,'" Scalia recently said on The Charlie Rose Show. "You want to go along with the Chief Justice because ... you want to make the institution work...
Roberts' success is also a reminder of the Chief Justice's limited but real power: as the Justice who speaks first at the court's private conference, he can frame the issues and influence the kinds of cases that the court agrees to hear in the first place. Under Roberts' leadership, the court has agreed to hear fewer polarizing constitutional cases and more cases of interest to business, which the Justices are more inclined to resolve without dividing along ideological lines. Of the 15 cases in which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed briefs this year, 80% were decided...
...overstated. In cases in which they have strong, pre-existing constitutional views on issues from abortion to guns to Guantánamo, the Justices are unlikely to persuade one another. And as Scalia said, "What changes the court, I assure you, is much less the character of the Chief Justice--although that has some effect--than it is the nature of the people who have been appointed." That's why, regardless of Roberts' current consensus-building, the future of the court will be determined by the next presidential election. If McCain wins and gets to replace one or two liberal Justices...
...Obama's domestic agenda--from health-care reform to a national response to global warming--and a court that is content to get out of the way of a Democratic President and Congress. Maybe that's why Obama is already sending bouquets to the Roberts Court: even if the Chief Justice isn't his new best friend, Obama may soon need him more than ever...
Scientists have plenty of reasons to be skeptical about iron-seeding, not the least being that it will alter the base of the marine food web, with ripple effects that are hard to foresee. Environmental opposition scuttled a similar plan of Climos' chief rival, another California company, Planktos. International law on the matter is murky. In May, the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity called for a moratorium on everything but "small" experiments "in coastal waters." Climos chief science officer Margaret Leinen concedes that even if the idea works, it won't remotely deal with all the planet's excess carbon...