Roberts' Conflicts Of Interest

Chief Justice Nominee's Vast Portfolio Creates Potential Problems

(AP) 
Burger was named chief justice in 1969 after ethics questions doomed Abe Fortas' nomination for the job.

Fortas, an associate justice, was filibustered in the Senate in 1968 partly because he had received $15,000 for teaching college seminars. Fortas resigned the next year after it was revealed that he also accepted money from a private foundation.

Roberts, a Harvard Law School graduate with a squeaky clean image, is expected to be cautious.

"I don't think there will be any sloppiness. We're not talking Abe Fortas here," said A. E. Dick Howard of the University of Virginia, an expert on the high court. "I don't think he'll try to dance around the recusal problem. He may find ways not to overdo it."

If a chief justice stays out of a case, the next senior justice presides at oral argument and oversees the voting.

Judges also are required by law to withdraw when their impartiality might reasonably be questioned.

Last year, Justice Antonin Scalia refused to step aside in a case filed by Vice President Dick Cheney, a friend. Cheney and Scalia had taken a hunting vacation together shortly after the court agreed to consider whether the Bush administration had to release information about private meetings of Cheney's energy task force.

Roberts has told the Senate he would stay out of some cases involving his former law firm and clients, abiding by guidelines from the federal court's policymaking board. He could face conflict issues related to his wife's financial interest as a partner at a prominent Washington law firm.

Roberts was a top Supreme Court lawyer earning more than $1 million a year when Bush named him in 2003 to the federal appeals court based in Washington.

Roberts took himself out of a major case now at the Supreme Court: the administration's attempt to seek $280 billion in profits from tobacco companies. Roberts did not give a reason, but his former law firm has taken positions adverse to the tobacco industry on behalf of health care clients.

Roberts has come under criticism from Gillers and other legal ethicists for ruling on a case involving the administration while he was meeting with White House officials who were preparing for a vacancy on the high court.

Roberts was among the judges who said the Pentagon could hold military commissions, or tribunals, for a foreign terrorism suspect at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Supreme Court will decide this fall whether to review that case, which would be an important test of the president's wartime powers.

Roberts would immediately take himself out of the case and others he voted on as an appeals court judge. Although not required, it is considered unseemly for judges to attempt to judge their own opinions.