Background
John Roberts was born in Buffalo, New York in 1955 to John Glover Roberts, Sr. and Rosemary Podrasky. All of his grandparents on his mom's side were Czechoslovakian. The family moved to Indiana, where Roberts would grow up. Roberts attended Harvard University where he was a history major. After his undergraduate studies, Roberts moved on to Harvard Law School. He was a distinguished student there and Judge Henry Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit took notice of him. Friendly was very friendly in offering Roberts a position as a his law clerk. After that, he was a law clerk for the justice that he would eventually replace - Justice William H. Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court. He was hired in 1981, after his internship with Rehnquist, by the Reagan administration to be a special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General and another time to be Associate Counsel to President Reagan. During this time, in 1984, John Roberts "scoffed at the notion that men and women should earn equal pay in jobs of comparable importance, and he belittled three female Republican members of Congress who promoted that idea to the Reagan administration." (USA TODAY) During the Clinton years, Roberts moved into a private practice, Hogan and Hartson (where he would make lots of $$) in Washington D.C. During his stint here, Roberts argued thirty cases in front of the Supreme Court. From 2003 - 2005 Roberts served on the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Court.
An article on Boston.com describes Roberts in his first few days in court as similar to Rehnquist, in the sense that he is a "no nonsense" type of Chief Justice. He upheld strict time limits for argumentation and he declined to hear a challenge to Georgia's mandatory DNA profile gathering of all felons. His first case on the Supreme Court was over whether or not companies are obligated to pay for their workers' time that they use changing into protective gear and uniforms. (Boston.com)
As a Supreme Court justice he makes a little over 200,000 a year (USA TODAY).
While he was a judge on the US Court of Appeals he made $171,800 annually. Roberts has substantial investments in XM radio, Time Warner, Texas Instruments and Microsoft. (COURT TV)
