The worst chief justice of all time

[Passages]

Move over, Roger Taney and Melville Fuller.

Lisa Needham
Jul 10, 2025

American history has no shortage of legendarily bad chief justices and disgraceful decisions. But Chief Justice John Roberts has overseen the wholesale corruption and capture of the Supreme Court, and history should look back on his tenure with revulsion.

This isn’t about whether there are individual cases from the past that are worse than any individual Roberts-era decision. It’s that compared to previous chief justices, the entire arch of the Robert Court has been about enshrining discrimination into law and protecting the powerful at the expense of the powerless.

The Taney Court
When people talk about the worst Supreme Court era, they’re often talking about Chief Justice Roger Taney, who headed the Court from 1836 to 1864. Taney wrote the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 case widely considered to be the Supreme Court’s most shameful decision.

Taney’s brazenly racist opinion said that a Black person whose ancestors were brought to the United States and sold into slavery could never be an American citizen. The majority also held that enslaved people were property, and because the Fifth Amendment forbids deprivation of property without due process, Congress could not ban slavery in the federal territories.
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/john-roberts-worst-chief-justice-of-all-time