IN A rare public appearance on the evening of November 20th, John Roberts, the chief justice of the United States, gave a talk at the New York University School of Law. The subject of the chief’s presentation was one of Mr Roberts’s predecessors: Charles Evans Hughes, the white-bearded, aquiline-nosed figure who steered the Supreme Court through the fraught New Deal era in the 1930s. Though the programme’s sponsors promised an exploration of Mr Hughes's "impact on our legal history", nary a word was heard about doctrine or jurisprudence. Specific cases were mentioned only in passing. The focus of the evening was on the whiskers and spirit of the man Teddy Roosevelt once called a “bearded iceberg” and whose career included stints as associate justice of the Supreme Court, governor of New York, secretary of state and Republican nominee for president before he was tapped by Herbert Hoover to return to the Supreme Court to take the chief's gavel in 1930. Though clean-shaven and undoubtedly perkier than his stiff forebear, Chief Justice Roberts offered a jaunty analysis of Chief Justice Hughes that betrayed important similarities between the two men. Mr Hughes oversaw a “sharply divided court”, Mr Roberts noted, and helped the justices learn how to “disagree without being disagreeable”. As the leader of a similarly riven bench today, Chief Justice Roberts has attracted strong criticism from both left and right. Liberals lament Mr Roberts’ votes to unleash outside campaign spending five years ago in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission and, in 2013, to gut the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v Holder. Meanwhile, Mr Roberts was pronounced an “outcast among conservatives” after he saved Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act from constitutional and statutory challenges in 2012 and 2015.

The equal-opportunity criticism that has been heaped upon Mr Roberts may be a sign he is no slave to ideology, though any fair accounting of his record would find him landing in the conservative camp much more often than on the side of the liberals. A roughly comparable ideological mix defined the tenure of Chief Justice Hughes. Shepherding the Court through the fight over Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programmes, Chief Justice Hughes took a centrist approach. At times he voted with the Court’s conservatives (and, in the unanimous 1935 decision in Schechter Poultry Corp. v US,with its liberals too) to strike down as unconstitutional legislation that may have gone too far in regulating the economy. But in 1937, Mr Hughes authored West Coast Hotel v Parrish,a major decision upholding a minimum-wage law in the state of Washington. From that year until his retirement in 1941, Mr Hughes voted consistently to let President Roosevelt’s policies well alone. In Mr Roberts’s words, he moved the court beyond one in which “nine old men were striking down everything FDR tried to do”.

In a dialogue with Second Circuit Chief Judge Robert Katzmann after his presentation, Mr Roberts praised Mr Hughes’s understated but effective effort to resist President Roosevelt’s plan in 1937 to pack the Supreme Court with six additional appointees. It was widely understood that FDR’s true motivation for adding justices was to build a majority that would uphold his New Deal policies, but he proposed the plan as a way to help the justices get their work done more efficiently. Deftly calling FDR’s bluff, Mr Hughes wrote a letter to the Senate detailing just how effectively the nine justices were already acquitting themselves and arguing that a bench of 15 would make the institution slow and unwieldy. The letter “fought against the fig leaf” justification and “took the air out” of FDR’s scheme, Mr Roberts said. The plan soon fizzled out without undue drama or confrontation.

Addressing the contours of a chief justice’s leadership, Mr Roberts acknowledged that his vote is just one of nine and that Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, with 30 and 25 years on the bench, respectively, exercise their own degrees of authority. He quipped that unlike a CEO, he could neither fire his subordinates nor “dock their pay”. But a chief justice must lead by “moderat[ing] the discussion” during hearings, Mr Roberts said, and can bestow “order and decorum” on the institution by establishing an appropriate “tone” and keeping an eye out for the justices’ relationships on the court. Martha Minow, dean of the Harvard Law School, wrote recently that Mr Roberts has, “right from the start”, shown “mastery and deft management” in his leadership of the Court. A couple of somewhat intemperate dissents to one side—in the same-sex marriage case last summer, he wrote that “[f]ive lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage, [s]tealing this issue from the people”—Ms Minow’s assessment is just about right.

Chief Justice Roberts comes off as disarmingly charming, exuding fair-mindedness and an understated wit. (Flashing a photo of his subject at age 6 during last week’s talk, he deadpanned that Charles Evans Hughes “was not born with a beard”.) With all the bracing controversies on his docket—including, this year, abortion, affirmative action, the fate of public unions and Obamacare (yet again)—John Roberts keeps his focus on the integrity of his court and how it is perceived, both at home and abroad. The Supreme Court stands as a beacon for similar courts around the world, he said, particularly for judges hailing from countries where the concept of an independent judiciary is novel. When his counterparts from other countries visit Washington, DC, “they are coming for inspiration.” The Supreme Court’s building, the justices’ majestic home first presided over by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year. The Corinthian courthouse is, in the current chief's estimation, "the best symbol of the rule of law worldwide.”