According to The LA Times, John Roberts did a fair bit of pro-bono work for a gay-rights group, and was instrumental in helping them win their case:
Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. worked behind the scenes for gay rights activists, and his legal expertise helped them persuade the Supreme Court to issue a landmark 1996 ruling protecting people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation.
Then a lawyer specializing in appellate work, the conservative Roberts helped represent the gay rights activists as part of his law firm's pro bono work. He did not write the legal briefs or argue the case before the high court, but he was instrumental in reviewing filings and preparing oral arguments, according to several lawyers intimately involved in the case.
Later on, the reporter recounts how Roberts went so far as to play Scalia before the group, peppering them with their archenemy's likely questions and teaching them how to parry, feint, and win. Kevin Drum is interested in the meta-story here. Why'd the reporter write this? Who gave it to him? Is he trying to please the left or enrage the right?
I'm not.
I'm more interested in Roberts, and the "why" of all this. It's one thing to protest your lawyerly inscrutability when you were counsel for the Bush administration or billing by the hour, but is the guy really such an intellectual jouster that he'd arm a gay rights group before a showdown with serious consequences for public policy just for fun? If so, what does that say about him?
This is pro bono work -- it's free. He chooses whether or not to do it. And, while I'm no lawyer, I can say with some certainty that you'd probably not find me donating my off-time to some Christian Right judicial group and their quest to get the court to toss evolution out of schools. If you believe in something, or against something, you don't take time away from your hobbies to help out the other side.
So say what you will about Roberts, the lawyer's lawyer, but the guy's total detachment from his convictions makes him a strange beast. Beyond gay rights, he did pro-bono work for someone convicted of Medicare fraud and in favor of 1,000 former welfare recipients -- whom he called "the neediest people in Washington -- who lost benefits during a budget crisis. The guy's sympathies, which Republicans keep assuring themselves are unknowable, are better labeled contradictory.
I don't know who John Roberts is. I suspect none of us do. But what's clear is that, however far he is to the other side, he's loathe to let convictions get in the way of a good argument. And that may be just as true when he's arguing the case as judging it.
