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From all outward appearances, Chief Justice John Roberts presents as a reasonable, congenial, fair-minded fellow, yet his fingerprints are all over some of the most divisive, repressive, punitive, and vindictive decisions ever handed down by the nation’s highest court.

Graves portrays Roberts as an ambitious ideologue from the outset, nurturing his conservative credentials as early as prep school, refining them at Harvard, and honing them to a razor-sharp worldview while clerking for Justice William Rehnquist.

His rise through the federal judicial system was calculated, driven by a zeal for overturning established laws that he and his backers, namely Leo Leonard and the Federalist Society, deemed too progressive. Voting rights, reproductive rights, and industry regulations were all in his crosshairs, but nothing, Graves argues, did more to threaten democracy and gut the Constitution than his efforts to buttress the theory of a unitary executive through his rulings in favor of Donald Trump’s immunity from prosecution as president.

As a legal analyst working in government and for progressive causes, Graves presents an exposé that provides an invaluable counternarrative to the generally benign media approach afforded Roberts. A well-researched, cogently analyzed, and eye-opening chronicle of Roberts and his seemingly compromised Supreme Court.

— Carol Haggas

(A Starred Review, featured as Booklist’s Review of the Day, September 11, 2025)