Controlling the pace of change on a court whose conservative wing is eager to move fast will be the central problem of the next phase of Chief Justice Roberts’s tenure, said Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
“If he’s smart, and he is, what he’s probably thinking is, ‘I do have a substantive agenda of things I want to accomplish. But it’s a lot easier to do that when the court retains its legitimacy. Let’s do as much as we can get away with, but maybe that’s a little less than some of my colleagues to my right think we can get away with,’” Professor Epps said…
“We do not sit on opposite sides of an aisle,” he said of his colleagues in a speech at the University of Minnesota in October. “We do not caucus in separate rooms. We do not serve one party or one interest. We serve one nation.”
The court’s other four Republican appointees — Justices Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — sent a different message not long after, all attending the annual gala dinner of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group.
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