Is it time for Chief Justice John Roberts to go?

As in….to retire?

His two closest friends think so, at least according to a story he just told.

Axios reports:

Chief Justice John Roberts said Wednesday he doesn’t think about retiring, but he once asked two longtime friends to intervene if his health is ever in decline.

“I’ve sat down with them and said, ‘I want at the appropriate time’ — because you don’t always notice that you’re slipping — ‘I want the two of you to tell me if it’s time to go,’” Roberts told a crowd of judges and lawyers gathered in Buffalo, N.Y.

“It was a long pause, and at once, the two of them said, ‘It’s time to go.’ So I said, ‘Alright, never mind,’” he continued.

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Roberts, 70, made clear he has no plans to step down any time soon, joking, “I’m going out feet first” when the question came up.

“I say that now. I mean, I’m sure if your health declines, and if you recognize that you’re a burden to the court rather than part of an assist to everybody, then, it’ll be time to go,” he said.

The chief justice’s comments at a fireside chat celebrating the 125th anniversary of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York come as the the issue of age takes on increased prominence in all three branches of government.

Now let me show you the clip….

Watch here:

Chief Justice John Roberts’ Says Two Close Friends Told Him “It’s Time To Go” pic.twitter.com/NqVPFfZ019

— Noah Christopher (@DailyNoahNews) May 12, 2025

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

How do you separate that from your private life?
How do you keep some privacy in your life and have this kind of bigger-than-life role as Chief Justice of the United States?

Well, recognizable… um, my wife and I were on vacation in Portugal, um, last year.
And another American sort of came up to us, and he’s looking at me and says,
“I know you. I know who you are. You’re John Boehner.”

And so, you know, they were sitting next to—
I had to spend the whole evening pretending to be John Boehner.

And so when you say readily recognizable, really, not, to be honest with you.
Um, uh, it’s getting worse though, in general, just because, you know,
the work of the Court is getting a higher degree of publicity.

So, um, uh, it is a problem. I will say 99% of the interactions I’ve had with people—
they come up and say hello, which is fine.

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And so that’s good.
But we’re not as recognizable as you might think.

Among a crowd of judges and lawyers, yeah—
but in the public at large, not much of a… yeah, problem.

So some of your colleagues have retired.
Do you ever think about that? I mean, you’re too young now, but someday would you?

No.

No?

Because—

Because you love what you do too much?

Uh, uh, uh, you know, I’m going out feet first.

Mm-hmm.

It’s just—
um—
I am too.

Well, good. Well…

Unless—

Uh, no, no, I say that now. I mean, I’m sure if your health declines—

Yes, of course.
If you recognize that you’re a burden to the Court rather than part of an assist to everybody,
then, you know, it’ll be time to go.

I have very good friends that were, um, for a long time—many years—
and I sat down with them and said,
“I want, you know, at an appropriate time if…”
Because you don’t always notice that you’re slipping—
“I want the, you know, two of you to tell me if it’s time to go.”

There was a long pause.
And one of the two of them said, “It’s time to go.”

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So I said,
“All right, never mind, I’m fine.”

I see he got a good laugh out of telling that story, but it didn’t really seem to me like the guys who said it were joking.

How did you take it?

Also, I actually found the phrase “I’m going out feet first” interesting, I’d never heard that one before and I didn’t know entirely what it meant so I looked it up:

The phrase “I’m going out feet first” in the context of retirement means that the person has no intention of retiring voluntarily—they plan to stay in their job until they die. The imagery comes from the idea that a dead body is typically carried out feet first, so it implies that the only way they’ll leave their position is in a coffin.

It’s often used humorously or dramatically to emphasize deep commitment to one’s work.

It comes from a longer fireside chat which you can watch here if you’d like:

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Um, I think most judges would agree that judicial independence is crucial.

Um, you agree. What do you think?

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Oh yeah, I mean it’s central. The only real political science innovation in our Constitution—I mean, you know, parliaments have been around for 800 years and, um, obviously executives—is the establishment of an independent judiciary.

Even places you think are similar to ours, like England, the judiciary in England was part of Parliament. I mean, they sat in the House of Lords because Parliament was supreme.

But in our Constitution, judges and the judiciary is a co-equal branch of government, separate from the others, with the authority to interpret the Constitution as law and strike down, obviously, acts of Congress or acts of the President.

And that innovation doesn’t work if the judiciary is not independent. Its job is to decide cases, but in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or of the executive, and that does require a degree of independence.

What do you think of these calls for impeachment of judges based on the decisions that they’ve made?

Well, I’ve already spoken to that. And, you know, impeachment is not how you register disagreement with decisions.

That’s what you’re for, right?

That’s what you’re there for. That’s what we’re there for.

Yeah. So lots of decisions that you make interpreting the Constitution have real-life practical consequences.

So, just as a for example, the Second Amendment decisions result in more people having guns. The Obamacare decision resulted in more people having health insurance. Obergefell resulted in more same-sex marriages.

Do you think about those practical consequences when you’re interpreting the Constitution, and should justices think about those practical consequences when they’re interpreting the words of the Constitution?

Mainly no, to both of those questions. Because if you do that—you know, with one exception I’ll talk about later—but if you do that, you’re kind of putting yourself in the place of the legislature.

You can say, for example, a consequence of the Second Amendment decisions are more people have guns and so there’s more, you know, accidental shootings, more shootings.

Or you can say the consequence is that more people are armed and therefore they’re in a better position if there’s foreign invasion, as there was with the British shortly after the adoption of the Second Amendment.

So that’s a good thing. Now if you decide one of those or the other based on your view of what you think is best, you would be substituting your own view for that of the people who wrote the Constitution.

So, no. I don’t think that’s a big part of at least how I do my job.

You’re making yourself the arbiter of what people were trying to accomplish in that law, when what you really need to be doing is sitting down and reading it in its appropriate context and trying to figure out what they meant.

Now, at one extreme, if an interpretation you adopt leads to some absurd result that nobody could plausibly have intended, then yeah, the consequences make a difference.

But I think it’s more important to figure out what the people who wrote the law had in mind and what they meant by the words they used, rather than think what is this type of legislation for.

Because then the interpretation flips.

So the courthouse here in Buffalo is named for Robert Jackson.

Mhm.

And you clerked for Justice Rehnquist, right? Justice Rehnquist clerked for Justice Jackson. So you’re sort of his grandson.

Sort of, in a way, yeah.

Did that have any special meaning for you? I know one of the portraits you have hanging in the justice’s conference room is Jackson.

Would you talk about that a little bit?

Well, sure. I mean obviously one of the more remarkable members of the Court in our history. Part of the reason he’s in our conference room is he was the Solicitor General who argued before the Court, the Attorney General in charge of the branch of Justice in the administration, the prosecutor at Nuremberg—which was very controversial on the Court.

His colleagues did not think that was necessarily something he should be doing. And obviously one of the great justices.

I mean, his eloquence is really extraordinary. His eloquence at Nuremberg was extraordinary.

So, yeah, I think it’s a great grandfather to have.

Now the other portraits—John Marshall Harlan is there. I just think somebody whose parents named him John Marshall who then lives up to it and ends up on the Supreme Court deserves an incredible painting.

And seriously, all his pronouncements in a number of areas of the law, I think, are really remarkable.

He was at the center in Plessy, wasn’t he?

Uh, yeah. Yes.

The lone dissent.

That’s where he said that we have a colorblind Constitution.

And the other one is Cardozo.

At one time I had five colleagues on the Court from New York, so I figured I had to give them some New Yorker on the wall.

And then, of course, the great Chief John Marshall as well.

Yeah.

So, I read a speech that you gave to your son’s graduating class that talked about the importance of getting to know the folks who work at the school—the custodial staff, the janitorial staff, those kinds of things.

Why is that important, and why was it important enough for you to give that message to your son and his classmates?

Well, it was eighth grade, and it’s a time when they need to learn a lot of things.

I mean, it’s important—just basic courtesy—but also it’s important to appreciate that no matter how high and mighty you might think you are, or others might think, that there are other people that are doing things that are just as vital to the functioning of our world as anybody else.

And all the people who work at the Supreme Court are part of the process that ends up in our articulation of what the law is.

Whether it’s the Chief Justice or somebody in the print shop or one of the law clerks or anybody else.

And I think if you lose sight of that, that’s a real shame.

You know, I do think again, particularly eighth grade, is a good place to learn that.

Did you do that when you were in school? Did you get to know those folks when you were in…?

Oh sure. Yeah.

But in eighth grade, I mean, those people were the boss there.

Yeah. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

You know, sometimes I’ll have folks who are cleaning the office come in and apologize to me for coming in and cleaning the office.

And I said, “If you folks don’t do this, I can’t do my job.” So, you know, as you say, it’s all—

Yeah. I apologize for making such a mess.

You talked about a few minutes ago reading petitions for cert and briefs. What’s the sort of criteria that you use for deciding whether you want to take a case?

What jumps out at you, other than writing about red dogs?

Well, and it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t really matter how right or wrong it is. I mean, the one thing you could say in a cert petition that’s not a good idea is how horribly wrong this is.

Because the first message that comes across to us is that, well, if it’s that wrong, we don’t have to worry about it. Nobody’s going to follow it. Mistake’s been made.

But one thing that’s certain—it’s not our job. We’re not a court of error in the sense that we correct mistakes.

So what we’re looking for are conflicting decisions on the same law that have to be fixed.

I mean, if one person reads this law and says, “You can’t do this,” and the other person says, “No, no, it means you can do this,” it should mean the same thing across the country.

And so that’s more the type of case we would take—to resolve that disagreement.

So people who want to get their cases heard need to have somebody who’s good at explaining why we need a greater degree of uniformity.

You can’t say in New York some particular expense is tax-deductible, but in California it’s not.

So a lot of the cases we get are actually not that glamorous. They’re not that interesting.

Because there are a lot of areas of federal law like, you know, patent law and copyright law, tax law, all sorts of things.

And when those disagreements come up, we’re the only ones who can fix it.

So a lot of our docket is pretty mundane.

Is there something to putting something in the cert petition that’ll catch the judges? I like the red dog story. I mean, do you find yourself, when you read something like that that has something that catches your eye, drawn to it a little more?

Oh sure. Yeah. I mean, you know, we take—whatever it is, I don’t know what the number is—1.5% of all the cert petitions.

You’ve got to do something to stand out of the crowd.

Unless you have a really good case, that may be enough to get our attention.

But other than that—and it makes sense—you have to be a good writer if you’re there.

Obviously, our law clerks read somewhere all the petitions and they write summaries, but we read from those summaries ones that we think might be likely candidates.

And, you know, it’s very hard to pick out the right ones.

Some of your colleagues have written autobiographies. Have you started yours yet?

No.

Are you going to?

No.

Why not?

I think my life is very interesting to me. I’m not sure it’s terribly interesting to anyone else.

Now, that’s not true of some of my colleagues.

Justice Thomas’s autobiography is absolutely gripping. If you haven’t read it and are at all interested in the Court, you should. It’s such an extraordinary story. I really couldn’t put it down.

But I don’t think I have that in me.

Let’s talk about your role in terms of you as a public figure. Obviously, you’re very recognizable. People know who you are.

You have to be on all the time—like now.

How do you separate that from your private life? How do you keep some privacy in your life and have this kind of bigger-than-life role as Chief Justice of the United States?

Well, “recognizable”—my wife and I were on vacation in Portugal last year, and another American sort of came up to us, and he’s looking at me and says, “I know you. I know who you are. You’re John Boehner.”

And so, you know, they were sitting next to us. I had to spend the whole evening pretending to be John Boehner.

So when you say “readily recognizable”—really not, to be honest with you.

It’s getting worse though, in general, just because the work of the Court is getting a higher degree of publicity.

So it is a problem. I will say, 99% of the interactions I’ve had with people, they come up and say hello, which is fine.

And so that’s good, but we’re not as recognizable as you might think among a crowd of judges and lawyers.

But in the public at large, not much of a problem.

Some of your colleagues have retired. You ever think about that? I mean, you’re too young now, but someday—would you?

No.

Because you love what you do too much?

I’m going out feet first.

I am too.

Yeah. Good.

Well, now, I say that now. I mean, I’m sure if your health declines and all and you recognize that you’re a burden to the Court rather than part of an assist to everybody, then it’ll be time to go.

I have very good friends for a long time, many years, and I’ve sat down with them and said, “I want—you know, at the appropriate time—because you don’t always notice that you’re slipping—I want the two of you to tell me if it’s time to go.”

There was a long pause, and at once, the two of them said, “It’s time to go.”

So I said, “Alright, never mind.”

I have that too. Touché. Well, for it.

It is kind of surprising—she’s going to tell me. She hasn’t said anything yet. Maybe after this, she will.

It is surprising how rare it has been on the Court for that to become an issue.

Really just a handful of times. I think it’s because it’s a collegial—both in a technical sense and in a popular sense—group of people.

You develop relationships where if the people do come—there have been times when somebody has stayed a little longer than they should—then the other colleagues come, and it’s always really worked out.

So I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.

But it is—yeah, I mean, I still feel pretty healthy.

Do you love what you do?

I mean, you really do. It’s exciting to get up every morning and go into work.

Doesn’t seem like work when it’s like that, right?

Yeah. Some days it does.

But it’s nice that we have a break in the summer. Louis Brandeis, one of our great justices, said that he could do the 12 months’ worth of work in 10 months, but he couldn’t do it in 12 months.

And I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that. We work at very close quarters on very important issues, on very sensitive issues, work that is hard to do.

And we do need a little break from each other. But it does—it’s interesting. It really creates such a strong bond.

I’m sure people listening to the news or reading our decisions—particularly decisions that come out in May and June—maybe think, “Boy, those people really must hate each other. They must be at hammer and tong the whole time.”

And we don’t.

I mean, dealing with the type of cases we do and their significance, it’s something only those nine people can know.

Whether you take something as basic and fundamental as whether somebody lives or dies, you share that in a very intimate way.

Or whether it’s whatever else that is the most important issue facing the public.

And even if you are on opposite sides more often than not—and we’re not—more of our decisions are unanimous than anything else, which people lose sight of.

But it is a strong, strong bond.

I think when Justice Ginsburg and Justice Scalia were on the court together and their friendship got some publicity, I think people got to understand that a little bit more.

Because RBG talked publicly about it a lot, and just how fond she was of Justice Scalia—and vice versa—even though they were at opposite ends of lots of decisions.

Yeah.

And a lot goes into that. And, you know, you have more in common with some colleagues than others.

Sure.

So I do things with some of my colleagues that I don’t with the others—and vice versa.

But it is a bond.

And, you know, there are issues and discussions I don’t share with my wife, and I know others don’t, just because they find it easier not to know, in terms of that, so they don’t have to worry about it.

But so, it is a small group. The bonds of real affection and friendship and shared experience are very, very strong.

And I think we try very hard not to let disagreements of the moment break that.

So you’ve been on the Court for 20 years.

Yeah.

And you were a circuit judge for a couple years before that.

Mhm.

Read a lot of district court decisions over the years.

Mhm.

So I’m looking for a little advice now.

What can you tell district judges about the decisions they write that might help us?

Yeah.

Brevity is good.

And I think it’s—you know, are my law clerks listening to this?

[Music]

Particularly with the district court, we recognize the primary responsibility of the district courts to deal with the facts, and we don’t want to be second-guessing the facts.

And so that’s an important thing to address if it’s going to be in the opinion—to make it clear what findings you’ve made about what, and what hasn’t.

And then I remember Justice Rehnquist, for whom I clerked, was very adamant about that.

He was a very good trial lawyer. He said you don’t want to waste too much time on the law if the facts are more important than the law.

And then, as it moves up, people are focused more on the facts.

He tried, when he was in my position as Chief Justice—he was remembering his days fondly as a trial lawyer—and he assigned himself to a district court in Virginia to hear a trial just to kind of get back in the saddle in that way.

And so he did. He issued a decision, and they appealed.

And the Fourth Circuit reversed him.

Is that right?

And he never did it again.

No. But the only thing that made him mad—and he was really upset about it—is that they issued it as a per curiam opinion.

And nobody had the guts to put their name on it.

Did you ever think about doing that? Trying to be a trial judge?

No.

Well, you didn’t try cases, so no difference there.

Yeah.

So you became Chief Justice in 2005.

You worked with Justice O’Connor and then Justice Ginsburg.

Yeah.

And now there are more women on the Court than ever.

Has that changed the dynamic or the culture of the Court in any way?

No. That would be my honest answer. I don’t think it has.

I’m sure when Justice O’Connor came on as the first woman, it had all sorts of consequences and changes.

But now, to be honest, I don’t think in terms of the dynamic at conference or the discussions and all that—I just don’t think it makes a difference.

I wouldn’t say that our conferences or our discussions are different because they’re women.

I would say it’s different because those particular individuals are there, and they all come and bring different perspectives.

But I don’t think I would say it’s different because they’re women.

Mhm.

So there’s been a lot of criticism of some decisions because they’ve changed precedent—the abortion decision most recently and other decisions like that.

But that happens all the time, right? I mean, there’s lots of times when courts have precedent that they think needs to be changed for whatever reason.

What kind of criteria do you apply to that yourself?

Well, first of all, there’s a lot of misconception on that subject.

Let’s see if I make sure I get these numbers right.

A recent study: the Warren Court overruled, I think, 3.2 decisions on average per year.

The Burger Court actually had a little bit more—I think they did 3.6 a year.

The Rehnquist Court moved down a little bit—only 2.4 cases, not percent, cases a year.

And in the past 20 years, the number has been 1.6.

So people have a somewhat wrong view of how many cases are being overturned.

Now, we take fewer cases now than they did before. But the number of important ones that would be subject to overruling are the same.

So a lot of people talk as if we’re overruling a lot more. It’s the lowest it’s been since the ’50s.

And some cases should be overruled.

I mean, aren’t you glad that Brown v. Board of Education overruled Plessy?

Or that Katz overruled Olmstead?

So the idea that it’s invariably a bad thing to overrule precedent is, I think, quite mistaken.

At the same time, you can’t do it willy-nilly.

Just because you look at a case and think, “Gosh, I would have had that principle come out the other way,” doesn’t mean you overturn it.

Stare decisis is an important part of our work. The law is supposed to be predictable.

So you need a special justification before you want to overrule a case—other than that you just happen to think it’s wrong.

We were talking about the Barnette case a little while ago, and that was a case that overruled a decision Justice Frankfurter made just a few years before—Gobitis or whatever.

And so yeah, it’s been around for a long time.

So when you do that, the first thing has to be that it’s clearly wrong.

The second thing has to be: does that make a difference?

I mean, for example, if you say, “Oh, you can’t figure out what the filing deadline is. Is it 10 days under the rule or is it 12 days?”

You have to decide it, but you shouldn’t come back and say, “Oh, it should have been 12 days, not 10 days, so we’re going to overrule that.”

That’s something where, in most cases, it’s more important that they be decided than that it be decided right.

Whether it’s 10 or 12 days—that’s a case like that.

So it has to be a case where it really makes an important, ongoing difference.

And be significant enough to the legal system that it justifies overturning the approach.

But it’s not something you want to do very often.

Can you talk a little bit about your experience clerking for Judge Friendly and Justice Rehnquist?

Yeah.

Two wonderful years in my life and two totally different experiences.

And I have to say, at a very personal level, the chance to clerk with Judge Friendly was very important.

I graduated from law school in 1979, and—this may be just the way I looked at it, maybe because being a kind of lawyer was second choice for me in general—but the law was a very cynical enterprise back then, I think.

In some ways, that’s good; in others, bad. It was very instrumental.

People were using law as a vehicle to achieve a particular objective, which there’s nothing wrong with at all. A lot of people do that.

But also in a cynical way. Law was not regarded as something of moral value, for want of a better word.

And so I felt, frankly, that maybe this had not been a good choice. This wasn’t something that was uplifting.

If you had a particular agenda you wanted to pursue—good, it could help you do that.

But then I went and was at the elbow of this extraordinary, great man—one of the most remarkable judges.

And he saw it differently. He really looked at it as a valuable gift that we had inherited for ordering society in a reasonable way.

And he was totally apolitical. The most brilliant judge of his generation.

Richard Nixon didn’t appoint him to the Supreme Court because he thought he would be soft on crime.

And from Nixon’s perspective, he would have been. He would have applied the law as it should be, and that meant some criminals were going to go free and others weren’t.

He was able to construct—certainly in his opinions, which lawyers here know were remarkable—a system that had internal coherence and that was really a gift.

It needed people who were willing to view it in those terms, rather than: this is how I’m going to use it to get to a particular result.

So that was where I kind of left my cynicism about the work that we as lawyers and judges do and appreciated that it had greater worth.

And just in terms of writing—he was a remarkably gifted writer.

He would come off the bench after argument and sit down with a legal pad—two of them, one for text, one for footnotes or notes—and just start writing.

He’d finish it in one or two days. The secretary would type it up and give it to one of us law clerks.

And we’d look at it and say, “Well, what does he want us to do?”

And he would have some ideas and look at it. So that was a really remarkable year.

And then with Rehnquist—it was now, Rehnquist was the generation between.

Friendly was kind of like almost two generations. He was older and I was just out of law school.

Rehnquist was kind of right in the middle.

And a different approach. His writing is crystal clear, very direct.

He had the same sort of appreciation—and I don’t mean to overuse these sorts of words—but reverence for what the law does.

But was very direct and analytic. You sort of knew exactly how it was structured and where it was going.

So it was a nice experience for me to have two very different people. And they really admired each other.

In fact, I got the clerkship with Rehnquist because he and Friendly were at a conference together.

I think Justice Rehnquist asked Judge Friendly if he had any good law clerks, and he mentioned one.

And I guess somebody else hired that one. And then he mentioned me.

So anyway, that’s—I don’t mean to be long-winded about it, but you do kind of look back at that and see these formative influences in your life and are grateful for them.

Does the way you deal with your clerks, by and large, mirror the way they dealt with you?

No. I wouldn’t say that.

When you’re in the middle of it, it’s kind of hard to be self-conscious and appreciate.

I don’t—I know one thing: the four clerks really do form quite a common bond.

Rehnquist used to talk to us about how that was, and he said it’s because the clerks are united by a common enemy.

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