If you could ask U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts one question, what would it be? I have at least two questions in mind, and as one of 235 law students blessed to participate in a Q&A session with the (relatively) new Chief Justice next week, I might even get a chance to ask one of them. I thought I'd share them with you in hopes of generating some discussion (and maybe helping me decide on a particular question). Here they are--in no particular order:

"The two most common approaches to discussing the decision-making process for individual judges seem to be the judicial activism/judicial abdication tension, and the favored mode of Constitutional analysis (originalism, textualism, modern ratification theory, et cetera). While this sort of classification is probably useful from a political perspective, it seems unlikely that the drive for social experimentation or deep academic inquiry exhibited by our lawyers and law professors, respectively, before they become judges simply vanishes upon appointment to the judiciary. To what extent--if any--do or should more fundamental legal philosophies (like one's commitment to virtue theory, naturalism, or any of the various positivist approaches) play a role in informing a judge's opinion?"

"It has been suggested that legal scholarship, as gloss in the margins of the modern-day corpus, is growing increasingly irrelevant to the technical and highly practical decisions faced by appellate judges. I would be interested to know, if you agree with this sentiment, what should be done about it--or, if you disagree, how you have personally found legal scholarship helpful in the judicial decision-making process."

Incidentally, the title of this post is part of a working title for a paper I have in mind. The glossators were the scholars who tried to reconcile all the apparent contradictions in Justinian's Corpus after its recovery in the West. The idea is that lawyering is an increasingly technical vocation, wherein philosophy and policy debate and social experimentation is frowned upon in favor of profiting from the status quo. When I started this entry, one of the questions I wanted to ask employed that metaphor more fully, but I realized that (as an advocate of judicial restraint) Chief Justice Roberts would probably give me a very perfunctory and predictable answer to the question I had in mind.

At any rate, what do you think? Which is the better question? Or do you have an even better question I could ask? I don't know that I will get the chance, but I plan on trying!