Success in both regards. Important very anniversary. Was the opening of the constitutional convention. Nowas a big day for what is the 4th circuit. Of course, George Washington was president of the convention. By nomination was secondeded rutledge, south carolina. Ashington included him among the six first appointees to the Supreme Court. He had a little bit of a chip on shoulder though to be fair. He thought he should have been the chief justice and felt over. D i dont know if it had anything resigned it, but he in 1791 without having heard a far e case to accept the more prestigious position of of south carolina. When john jay left to accept the far more prestigious position as governor of new york, president appointed rutledge to be the second chief justice. But Alexander Hamilton was his first joyce and washington hamiltonim the job but declined stott think if things had been different. Successful play on broadway could be a hip hop justice bout a chief which would have been a little different. Jay and i are not going to rap ct this interview in though and i think well get started right now. Thank you. [applause] chief, thank you so much for coming to our little gathering. Its just great to have you here. Back a long way nd we were together in the Justice Department during the reagan administration. At that tell you that point, the chief judgment was of mously respected by all us within the Justice Department that respectse and has only grown over the course the years. I know of course that the chief respected in atly the public at large but i think hat this conference is the Perfect Place to emphasize just within the se of us cherish and respect the quality of his leadership. Dignity and the character and wonderful sense of which the chief justice presides. Thats probably a good place to end right there. [laughter] its going to be downhill from there. [laughter] but just one more. Thing. Re i think that what binds us all nobodyep love of law and loves the law ive never met anybody that really loves the justice than the chief of the united states. The potential that law has to preserve our maintain order and to make more satisfying majority of all american citizens. He not only chairs our embodies them. And we really like that. Its so nice. And welcome, chief. Thank you. Thank you. You. s great to see mourn thet many of us scalia. F justice i was particularly pleased to see all of his colleagues on across the rom pay their respects to not just the jurisprudence but warm and magnanimous spirit that Justice Scalia exhibited particularly proud to gene ustice scalias son as a member of our fourth conference. Chief we didnt get a chance celebrate. You were talking in your remarks about anniversaries. Didnt unfortunately have because of the way the calendar have a chance to celebrate your tenth anniversary becoming chief justice. As you look back, i guess a a ade is a time to reflect little over a decade. What would you say has been the accomplishment for you in the course of your 11 years now . Whats the thing you look back the most satisfaction . I would say serving for ten years. [laughter] is the most it may sound facetious but the first thing i to point out is that its very difficult for any member of the court and certainly for a chief justice to single out any particular accomplishment as his own. We are very much a body in the sense, not simply in the sense of we get along with each other although we do but we as a group. And i think it be better to sort accomplishments of the court over the past ten years have been. Answer is really quite simple. We as a group i think have done job of protecting the role coequal branch a challenge that is marble on our courthouse of equal justice under law. You know, there are points where the court maybe has not been as good at doing that as it might have been. Typically those are occasions i dissented. We dont set out to accomplish great things. Think thats the responsibility of the political branchs. Simply to do is we can. As best as a youre nearing tend of term. The end of a term. Istorically most of the really big cases have come down toward and i get dong. The School Bell Rings and people are rushing out the door. Does the adjournment date, does it effect of the june opinions . Is there a rush to get things out that in some way leads to less scrutiny of those last opinions coming out the door . Chief Justice Roberts you know, i think that might have been true a generation ago. When i was a law clerk in 1980, the court issued 150 opinions in that term. Today, we issue about half that. There is a lot of debate about the reasons for that. Some of the reasons are interesting to talk about. But when you have 150 opinions you are try to get outcome i think maybe the answer is, yes. For lawyers working on briefs or other analyses, i would look at the date of the opinion carefully in that area. If the in that era. If the date is june 20, i would think to better look at it. You are right, the hard ones naturally tend to take longer. At least we know we have until roughly the end of june. So we focus maybe on the easier once before that. But i dont think they suffered quality. Of course, we dont have a fast deadline. We dont leave until all our work is done and sometimes it has pushed us to july. Sometimes, we have even gotten a day or two out early. You can imagine its hard if everybody worked on their own schedule with different priorities, nothing would come together and to the very las day. So we kind of have to sit down and say lets focus on these cases first and get it all done. If we are their past the fourth of july, that is probably my fault. Judge wilkinson you mentioned the fact that the docket has gone down from maybe 150 275. There are stash from 150 to 75. Chief Justice Roberts you are doing very well so far. We have four opinions out of the Fourth Circuit so far. You have been affirmed in three of them. I have to admit, i dissented in one of those three. Judge wilkinson keep up the good work. [laughter] speaking of opinions and everything. Every so often, we have occasion to look through the opinions of the 1930s and 1940s and 19 fifth. These and i and 1950s. And i am amazed at how short some of these are and the footnotes that some of these have. You look back at brown v board of education and others, they were monumental cases and they were written with very short opinions. But the modern trend has been toward longer and longer opinions with more and more footnotes than the 30s the 19 30s, 1920s, 1940s and 1950s. A lawyers most valuable asset is his or her time. Do these long opinions and i think the court of appeals needs to take cognizance of this as well are we imposing an undue burden on the time of an issue with the length of our opinions . Simply what we require, lawyers and District Court judges and others to read, is that a problem . Chief Justice Roberts yes and no. Some of the examples you gave have particular reasons. You know, brown can i guess, was less than 10 pages. And brown 2 was even shorter than that. Burrell war and earl warren it was important to have a unanimous opinion. If he had taken one more page were two more. Or two more pages, then the agreement would have served to unravel. So that was important. I think he wanted it to be short enough so everyone could read it, not just the legal profession. The commentators and the reporters would not really have the opportunity. It would be right there. You could look at the New York Times and it is right there. So he had reasons for keeping it short. I agree with you on the length of opinions and footnotes. I think i have the fewest number of footnotes of any of the justices in my opinions. As you say, we get busy and you dont often read them. Why should i write them if no one is going to read them. But i do think it is a problem. You said 1930s, i guess, will it is almost a hundred years since then. The statutory production is not what it is now. You didnt have. Frank. It takes a few more pages to find your way out of the forest in those cases. So that might be part of it. Technology is part of it. It is easy to write things and change them. Here is for paragraphs about this issue. In the older days it was harder to make revisions. One reason that has been there are fewer conflicts among the lower courts and Everybody Knows what everybody else is doing now. And say thisa long and not to know that the supreme come out theeady other way. Now you push a button and you know every case on everything. Judge wilkinson change is occurring on every front. The size of a opinions and everything. Another big area of change, i think, has been the nature of the Supreme Court appellate bar. I remember Justice Powell used to complain a little bit that there were all too many people i coming up and arguing Supreme Court cases, because some of the advocates were way in over their head. Now the complaint is that we have all too few, and that it is a lower calabar, especially in the private civil cases. And there are too many repeat players. It is sort of, hey, lets give somebody else a chance. Is the appellate bar becoming to elite and too ingrown in your judgment . Chief Justice Roberts at that time, he talked about the very trend. You go back to 1980 i dont remember the numbers, but adding aside the governments lawyers, i think there were two or three people that argued more than one case that term, maybe a couple more. Now it is premature teen. The lawyers we see quite often in a single case. One has done 10 arguments. One has done 30 arguments. That was unheard of back then. So it is a change. The bar is more specialized. I think the Supreme Court advocacy was not recognized as a specialty until fairly recently. In many ways, it is quite a good thing. It is not like even arguing before the court of appeals. Is good to have people who know that and have done it before and understand when we ask hundred questions in an hour, which has happened. Although a case involves a bankruptcy statute, it is probably not in the Supreme Court because of bankruptcy issues. It is there because of how we view statutory interpretation. It is good to have people who know that. It is good to have repeat players, just as in any other court. They know that they are going to be up there again later, so they will be a little more circumspect about how they analyze the record and explained the cases to you. Having said all that, i think i and many of my colleagues sort of miss the opportunity of a mr. Smith comes to washington moment where you have a sole practitioner with a battered briefcase and shares what his practice is like and his understanding of what the court is like. And they often do a very good job. But it is just so hard. You for months focus on a Supreme Court case. To that extent, i think it is disappointing them. You lose a little bit of the color and texture of an argument when it is the same people. Although, we benefit a great deal from having experts before us. Judge wilkinson yes, it is less and less a place for amateurs. I remember one of the comments Justice Powell had made. They dont even know our names. And they would be calling one justice the name of another justice. [laughter] at least with the repeat players, they are going to get the names right. Chief Justice Roberts you would have thought so, but our last case, a mistake happened. Justice ginsburg was referred to as justice oconnor. [laughter] by a repeat player. Sometimes people ask what advice i have for advocates and i always say dont use their names. [laughter] judge wilkinson thats probably true. I have a hard time thinking of any area touching the Supreme Court where there isnt change. One of the big areas of change involves law clerks. It used to be of course, the numbers of clerks have increased. People keep reminded me reminding me that John Marshall wrote with hardly any law clerks, how did he do it . [laughter] in addition, it used to be that clerks would go right from law school to the Supreme Court. Now we have a situation where a larger number of law clerks are a hired actor, a year or two or more of government service. You have it flipped around. We used to be training in the Judicial Branch law clerks for private practice. They see folks in private practice training lawyers to serve as law clerks. Is this a good trend . Part of the value of a clerkship was at least partly a sentimental value. I know you felt this way about your clerks. This was our first formative professional experience. So we held it in particular sentimentally throughout the rest of our professional lives. It wasnt just another stop. In my right about the trend . And is it a good idea . Chief Justice Roberts well, you mentioned John Marshall not having any clerks. It sort of ties into your earlier question. I suspect one of the reasons that these opinions or longer is that there are more clerks working on things. I suppose it would be a waste if you didnt put this in somewhere. [laughter] so that might be a part of the problem. I sometimes think it would be better if we had two clerks or fewer. But you are right. There is a trend of hiring people with outside experience before coming to the court. I know ive done some of that. I would say most of my clerks are still hired out of the Appellate Court clerkship. I think the jury is still out. I think there are disadvantages from having somebody who has been in practice for a while. Without disparaging any of my clerks by saying that. Im trying to figure it had a phrase that. In a sense it could be that it is because they get to be too good at law. We want someone to find the cases on this issue and prepare that. We dont want something that is a little too polished, whether its drafts or memos. We always proudly say we are the only branch of government where we still do our own work. And if you get somebody who is a little too good at producing what you want them to produce, it makes it harder for you to find a way into the writing sometimes. Judge wilkinson i dont want to go to Justice Powell too often, but he is to complain that the clerk was way too green when he first came on the court. He was a managing partner of a major law firm. He had years of experience. But then as the years went on, he said it is a distinct advantage to have law clerks were green because they bring the experiences of their generation and the latest thinking from the law schools and everything. So he went a complete 180 on that. Chief Justice Roberts yeah. Judge wilkinson i wanted to ask a question on a more lighthearted vein. When chief rehnquist came to our court, he used to compare the cultures of the different circuit courts of appeal. He used to talk about the blacktie tradition. He would contrast that with what he called the white sandals of the ninth circuit. I guess in light of this contrast that was drawn, do you think the Fourth Circuit needs to lighten up . [laughter] chief Justice Roberts i think maybe the other circuits should tighten up a little bit. [laughter] [applause] one of the great things about my current job is that i do go to the other circuits. I come here, of course. And the d. C. Circuit is in my responsibility. And there is one other peer in you get a flavor for what they are like. The organizers here have a dress code and formal attire and evening banquet and business attire here. You mentioned the ninth circuit, no shirts, no shoes, no service kind of thing. [laughter] which makes sense. The last time i was there, the conference was on the beach in malibu and that is sort of the setting. It is the sort of federal system you see it reflected in that as well. You go to new york and the Second Circuit pride themselves in that everybody gives oral argument. Which means, literally, it is often five minutes. And you do get a real sense of new york. What do you get to say . Goodbye. And here, the culture is a little more genteel so it makes sense to have that kind of approach. Some of them i was just out at the eighth circuit a month or so ago. Their main characteristic is sort of goes from north dakota to arkansas. So it is their main characteristic is sort of you know, it goes from north dakota to arkansas. So it is it reflects our diversity. Judge wilkinson the Second Circuit, where they have five minutes of oral argument of people say to me, the red light isnt really red. They have argued in other circuits where the red light really did mean stop talking. It is traditional in our conversations that you will tell us what is on your Summer Reading list. And give us i know you will have a little bit of downtime, welldeserved, during the summer. What are you going to be reading and what should i read what should we read . Chief Justice Roberts i will give a little shout out to my colleagues. Im sure Justice Breyers new book the world and the court. I always read my colleagues books over the summer. Judge wilkinson do you agree with Justice Breyer . Chief Justice Roberts i wouldnt phrase it just like that. [laughter] i havent read it. It is on the last. To be honest, i think it is a phony debate. Everyone thinks that we ought to the at foreign law to extent that it has some invaluable to teach us. Nobody on the Court Disagrees with that. The issue comes up when you are looking at foreign law to directly informed the interpretation of the constitution, y