Boy in the Bubble: John Roberts has made a career of undoing progress on civil rights and ignoring the consequences.

• Author: Mencimer, Stephanie

The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts

by Joan Biskupic

Basic Books, 377 pp.

John Roberts Jr. was only two and a half years into his tenure as chief justice when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. The case, argued in January 2008, involved a challenge to a strict Indiana voter ID law that Democrats argued could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of mostly poor and minority voters.

Under the law, at the time the strictest in the nation, voters without ID could cast a provisional ballot on Election Day, but they would have to return to the county clerk's office within ten days with proper ID to make the vote count. Paul Smith, the lawyer for the challengers, argued that lots of people in Indiana would have trouble just getting to the clerk's office, much less getting an ID, in ten days. Roberts, a Hoosier himself, was skeptical. "County seats aren't very far for people in Indiana," he said.

Smith responded that, in fact, for poor African Americans without a driver's license, it could be truly challenging. "If you're an indigent person, Your Honor, in Lake County, in Gary, Indiana, you'd have to take the bus seventeen miles down to Crown Point to vote every time you want to vote.... That's a significant burden." Roberts wasn't convinced. The Court upheld the law, with Roberts in the majority. A few months later, untold numbers of Indiana voters were turned away at the polls because they didn't have the right ID, including nearly a dozen octogenarian nuns whose polling station was in their own convent. The decision gave the green light for a rash of other Republican-controlled states to pass similar legislation.

I remember sitting in the courtroom during the oral arguments in Crawford, thinking that for someone so breathtakingly smart, the new chief justice seemed awfully blind to how things work in the real world. He had graduated Harvard College summa cum laude in three years before going on to finish top in his class at Harvard Law. He'd served as a deputy solicitor general, worked as a leading Supreme Court litigator in private practice, and spent a couple of years as a judge on the powerful DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Yet on that January day in 2008, he appeared utterly baffled by the notion that a seventeen-mile trip to the county clerk's office could be a challenge for people without driver's licenses.

I wondered: Was it willful ignorance? A desire to simply ignore the obvious racial implications of the case? Or was the chief justice of the United States really that clueless? In The Chief, CNN legal analyst Joan Biskupic doesn't quite answer those questions, but her book makes painfully clear that the defining feature of Roberts's legal career has been his relentless efforts to roll back any measures to combat racial inequality and to make life more difficult for minorities.

When President George W. Bush nominated Roberts for a spot on the Supreme Court, Roberts was supposed to be the anti-Robert Bork. Rejected by the Senate in 1987 after being nominated by...