I wrote about the role of civil procedure issues in the Year End Report on the Federal Judiciary because it was a recurring theme and because the 2015 Report on that topic drew public and scholarly attention. I did not write about it because the Reports say anything meaningful, deep, or insightful. Nor can they be taken seriously, given the general inconsistency of the Chief’s words with the Court’s actions. But the 2025 Report takes the prize for meaninglessness and inconsistency.
This year’s “theme” is the coming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (the “semiquincentennial,” if you’re scoring at home). His annual opening historical anecdote involves publication of Common Sense and its effect on the independence movement. It then traces the slow evolution of liberty and equality from the Declaration of Independence to the present, with stops through Frederick Douglass, Lincoln’s response to Dred Scot, Gettysburg, Susan B. Anthony, the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments, Plessy, Brown, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. All a part of the “never-ending quest to fulfill the Constitution’s promise of a ‘more perfect Union.’” And with the “Third Branch” fulfilling its obligation “to decide the cases before us according to our oath, doing equal right to the poor and to the rich, and erforming all of our duties faithfully and impartially under the Constitution and laws of the United States.”
Roberts presents this at (at best) a sixth-grade level. And the theme is laughable given that as a member of the Court, Roberts has written or joined judgments:
• Giving the President (or at least President Trump) powers about which King George III (the guy against whom he says the Declaration listed 27 grievances) could only dream, setting forth a wave of illegality.
• Approving governmental discrimination against trans people and people of color who maybe-possibly-might-we-don’t-know-but-we-need-to-check are committing the civil offense of unlawful presence.
• Authorizing government to deny or hamper the right of certain groups to vote (unsurprisingly absent from the Report’s list of milestones on the way to equality–the Voting Rights Act that he hopes to continue gutting).
• Ratcheting the judicial power despite Lincoln’s key objection to Dred Scot (reflected in his First Inaugural rather than the 1857 speech Roberts cites): An overweening judiciary.
Maybe this all proves Steve Vladeck’s point: If the Court does not shore-up its own legitimacy, it cannot be taken seriously for matter large or, as with the Year-End Report, small.
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