Jonathan Turley wants Chief Justice John Roberts to think less like a judge and more like a ballplayer. Specifically, like Ted Williams, the Red Sox legend who famously refused to tip his cap to a hostile Fenway crowd after hitting a home run in his final at-bat. The lesson, as Turley laid it out in a Fox News opinion column, is about composure under fire: when the institution is under attack, the leader should project strength and resolve, not panic.
Turley's target is the way Roberts handled the unprecedented leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade. The George Washington University law professor argued that Roberts scrambled to contain the fallout rather than treating the breach with the kind of cold, deliberate authority the moment required.
On May 2, 2022, Politico published a leaked draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The draft, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, would overturn Roe v. Wade and nearly fifty years of abortion precedent. Within hours, the Supreme Court confirmed the document was authentic but stressed it was preliminary, with a final ruling expected by the end of June.
Roberts moved fast. Less than 24 hours after the Politico story broke, he ordered an investigation, directing the Marshal of the Court to track down the source. In a public statement, he framed the episode in stark terms.
"This was a singular and egregious breach of that trust that is an affront to the Court and the community of public servants who work here."
He followed that with a pointed warning aimed at whoever was responsible.
"To the extent this betrayal of the confidences of the Court was intended to undermine the integrity of our operations, it will not succeed."
Three days later, at a judicial conference in Atlanta, Roberts went further. He called the leak "absolutely appalling" in his first public appearance since the story broke. He insisted the breach would not alter the Court's work.
"If the person behind it thinks that it will affect our work, that's just foolish."
Roberts also tried to contain the broader institutional damage. He told the conference that "one bad apple" should not affect "people's perception" of the Supreme Court. The message was clear: the Court would not buckle.
But after those initial statements, the trail went cold. Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley was assigned to lead the internal investigation, yet the Court offered almost nothing in the way of updates. AP News reported that the Court repeatedly declined to say whether the leaker had been identified, whether anyone faced discipline, or whether outside investigators had been brought in. Supreme Court spokeswoman Patricia McCabe responded to emailed questions with five words: "The Court has no comment."
Roughly three dozen law clerks who likely had access to the draft left after the Court's term ended, a fact that may have made the investigation harder to close. Investigators have not publicly confirmed whether any of those former clerks cooperated or were compelled to participate after their departures.
This is where Turley draws his Ted Williams parallel. Williams played his entire career in front of fans and sportswriters who alternately adored and savaged him. His response was never to chase approval or manage the crowd. He played his game. When he crushed that final home run in 1960, he rounded the bases and walked into the dugout without so much as a glance at the stands. The crowd roared. Williams did not flinch.
Turley's argument is that Roberts, facing perhaps the most destabilizing internal crisis in modern Supreme Court history, needed that same kind of unshakable posture. Instead, Turley contends, the Chief Justice's reaction looked reactive. The rapid public statements, the hastily ordered investigation, and then the long silence all combined to project an institution caught off guard rather than one operating from a position of strength.
The distinction matters because the Supreme Court's authority rests almost entirely on public legitimacy. The Court commands no army and controls no budget. Its power flows from the perception that its deliberations are principled, confidential, and above political manipulation. A leak of a draft opinion on the most politically charged case in a generation struck at the heart of that perception.
The Court has faced no shortage of politically explosive moments in recent terms. Oral arguments over Trump's birthright citizenship order revealed deep internal divisions, and the justices have repeatedly waded into cases where the political stakes dwarf the legal questions.
Turley's point is not that Roberts should have ignored the leak. It is that the response should have conveyed institutional gravity rather than institutional alarm. A leader who projects calm command in a crisis reassures the public that the institution can absorb the blow. A leader who appears to scramble invites the opposite conclusion.
The most damaging element of the episode may not be the leak itself but the investigation's apparent failure to produce a definitive public result. Authorities have not publicly confirmed who leaked the draft. They have not said whether the investigation was formally closed or remains open. They have not disclosed whether polygraph examinations, forensic digital analysis, or other investigative tools were used.
That silence feeds competing narratives. Critics on the left suggested the leak was an inside job by a conservative clerk hoping to lock in the Dobbs majority before any justice could waver. Critics on the right suspected a liberal clerk or staffer intended the leak to generate public pressure that might flip a vote. The final Dobbs opinion, issued in June 2022, was largely unchanged from the leaked draft, a fact that undercuts the theory that the leak was meant to alter the outcome.
Personnel changes on the Court have continued to draw attention. Speculation about Justice Alito's possible retirement has intensified as the Trump administration eyes opportunities to reshape the bench, and internal Court dynamics remain a subject of intense public interest.
But the unresolved leak investigation sits like an open wound. Every term that passes without answers reinforces the impression that the Court either cannot or will not hold its own people accountable.
Turley's column lands at a moment when the Supreme Court's credibility is under pressure from multiple directions. Decisions on presidential power, executive authority, and social policy have made the Court a central player in nearly every major political fight. The Court's recent move to overturn Trump's tariff policy underscored just how willing the justices are to insert themselves into disputes that shape the daily lives of millions of Americans.
The leak episode raised a question that goes beyond any single case: can the Court protect its own deliberative process? If the answer is no, or if the answer is "we tried but we're not going to tell you what happened," the damage compounds with time.
Roberts has spent his tenure as Chief Justice positioning himself as an institutionalist, a guardian of the Court's legitimacy above partisan outcomes. That self-image makes the leak response all the more consequential. An institutionalist who cannot secure his own institution's secrets faces a credibility problem that no eloquent opinion can fix.
Divisions among the justices have been on full display in other contexts as well. Justice Thomas's dissent in a recent tariff decision highlighted the philosophical fault lines that run through the current Court, fault lines that make confidential deliberation all the more essential.
Turley's Ted Williams analogy carries a final, quieter point. Williams never explained why he refused to tip his cap. He did not issue a statement. He did not convene a press conference. He simply performed at the highest level and let the work speak for itself. The mystique of that silence was its own kind of authority.
Roberts, by contrast, spoke publicly, launched an investigation, and then went quiet in the worst possible way: not the silence of strength, but the silence of a process that produced no visible result. The difference between the two silences is the difference between command and retreat.
Whether Roberts could have realistically handled the crisis differently is a fair debate. No Chief Justice in modern history had faced anything like it. But Turley's argument is less about what was possible in the moment and more about what the moment revealed: that the Court's leader treated an attack on institutional integrity as a management problem rather than a defining test of leadership.
When the most powerful court in the world cannot tell the public who breached its walls, the question stops being about one leaked document. It becomes about whether the institution still commands the trust it claims to deserve.
