Noah Feldman, Columnist

The Chief Justice's Wife Has Every Right to Her Legal Career

With critiques of Jane Sullivan Roberts, we seem to be developing an expectation that the justices cloister themselves away from the real world. That will backfire.

February 2, 2023 at 1:30 PM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

The Robertses in 2005.
Photographer: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

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The search for conflicts of interest in the personal lives of the Supreme Court justices has reached a new level of paranoia with the suggestion that Chief Justice John Roberts’s wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, somehow shouldn’t be allowed to do her job as a legal recruiter.

The suggestion seems to have arisen from a letter to Congress from one of Sullivan Roberts’s former colleagues, a man who was fired from the recruiting firm and sued over his dismissal. Rather than dismissing him as a disgruntled ex-employee, the New York Times amplified his concerns and quoted Richard Durbin, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, as saying the letter raised “troubling issues that once again demonstrate the need” for ethics reforms at the Supreme Court.