Roberts, John Glover Jr (1955– )

Chief justice of the US Supreme Court from 2005. A conservative jurist, he was deputy solicitor general 1989–93 under President George H W Bush and was a judge in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit 2003–05. In July 2005, President George W Bush nominated him initially to replace the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor as an associate justice on the US Supreme Court and to become the court's first new member since 1994, but on the death of William H Rehnquist, in September 2005, nominated him instead as chief justice.

Born in Buffalo, New York, into an upper-middle-class Roman Catholic family, the son of a steel industry executive, he was brought up in Indiana and studied at Harvard University and Harvard Law School. After graduating, he served as a law clerk to the US Supreme Court associate justice William H Rehnquist and as special assistant to the Attorney General (1981–82) and associate counsel to the president (1982–86) under the Republican president Ronald Reagan, before entering private law practice at Hogan & Hartson in Washington, DC in 1986.