Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.

In Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s annual report on the state of the federal courts, he has "implored lawyers to work together and judges to take a more hands-on role to improve a federal litigation system that has grown 'too expensive, time-consuming, and contentious,'" The Washington Post's Robert Barnes reports. Roberts said the 2015 amendments to the federal civil rules provide an opportunity to improve the federal courts, including for burdensome discovery requests.

Adam Liptak, writing in the New York Times, prognosticates that this term of the U.S. Supreme Court could define Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.'s legacy with possible cases about whether gay Americans have a constitutional right to marry and about federal subsidies to consumers who purchase health-care coverage through federally run insurance exchanges. "Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is entering his 10th term, and it is one that could define the legacy of the court he leads. Should the court establish a right to same-sex marriage, it would draw comparisons to the famously liberal court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, said David A. Strauss, a law professor at the University of Chicago," Liptak reports. The justices have not decided whether to take up cases involving same-sex marriage or Obamacare yet.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts joined with "unexpected allies--his liberal colleagues--in an alliance that drew some of the Supreme Court's major decisions closer toward the ideological middle in the term just concluded," the Wall Street Journal reports. For example, Roberts aligned with the liberal justices and conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy to uphold a precedent allowing securities fraud class-action plaintiffs to rely on the theory that market prices reflect all publicly available information and that keeping information from investors can constitute fraud on the market. But the test was refined so that corporations can more easily get class actions thrown out, WSJ reports.

The New York Times' Adam Liptak has this Sunday Review piece exploring how activist U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.'s court has been. There's a surprise in the findings. " If judicial activism is defined as the tendency to strike down laws, the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is less activist than any court in the last 60 years," Liptak writes.