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‘Judicial Minimalist’ John Roberts Violated Procedures To Write Maximalist Birthplace Citizenship Opinion

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Chief Justice John Roberts has long prided himself on being a judicial minimalist and proceduralist. He wants to preserve the image of the judiciary, and especially the Supreme Court, as an impartial arbiter of cases and controversies.  

Very often, when highly politicized cases connected to Trump have reached the court, Roberts has sought ways to defuse the case without looking like the court picked a side with partisan interest. For example, in the Trump v. U.S. (2024) case about presidential immunity, Roberts led the majority to rule in favor of Trump but tried to make the opinion about the executive as such and not Trump specifically.  

In the recent Learning Resources v. Trump decision from February, Roberts decided against President Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs on the basis, not of constitutional interpretation, but of statutory interpretation. Roberts narrowed the question to the specific statute in question —the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977 — and held the president’s tariffs were not explicitly authorized by the statute. Regardless of the rectitude of this decision, it was the simplest way to rule against Trump and answer the narrowest legal question possible in the case. 

Similarly, if Roberts can find procedural reasons to not rule directly on the merits of a question but instead push it back to the other branches of government or the lower courts, he is often happy to do so. Consider that the Supreme Court handed down the Trump v. CASA (2025) decision last summer, a case that originated from President Trump’s executive order on birthplace citizenship. However, in that opinion, the Roberts court merely settled the procedural question about whether district court judges can issue universal injunctions as........

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