President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of John G. Roberts, Jr.  to fill retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s Supreme Court seat unleashed a storm of speculation about the likely substance of his jurisprudence.  That storm intensified when, following the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Roberts was designated to fill the center seat instead.  Although Roberts’ résumé, including his  experience as a White House counsel and Deputy Solicitor General in two Republican administrations, clearly marked him as a conservative, it was generally agreed that his opinions as a circuit court judge provided few clues to his positions on the most divisive issues likely to come before the Supreme Court.
As I have elsewhere used the term, judicial personality is the voice that a judge crafts from a range of rhetorical choices including--among numerous other elements--diction, metaphor, syntax, allusion, and tone.  In this era of opinion drafting by multiple law clerks, it is far rarer than it once was for a judge to develop a distinctive voice that expresses a consistent attitude toward the business of decision making.  Roberts, however, is one of those infrequent exceptions.  From his first opinion on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Roberts has emerged as a confident stylist who deliberately selects the word, the image, the tone that will convey not just a legal position but a personal perspective as well.