LAWFUEL – The Law Newswire – The U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts was taken to a hospital after a fall near his summer home in Port Clyde, Maine, a Supreme Court spokeswoman said. Bloombergs report.
“He fell on a dock” near his home, Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said. “He was described as conscious and alert.”
Roberts, 52, was taken to Penobscot Bay Medical Center in nearby Rockport, she said. Hospital spokesman Christopher Burke declined to confirm that Roberts was a patient or to give any details. Arberg said she had no information about the extent of Roberts’s injuries or what caused the fall, which she said occurred at about 2 p.m. Maine time.
Roberts suffered a seizure while golfing in January 1993, Newsweek magazine reported in August 2005, quoting Justice Department colleague Larry Robbins. “It was stunning and out of the blue and inexplicable,” Robbins said, according to the magazine.
Roberts wasn’t allowed to drive for several months after the seizure, Newsweek said, adding that doctors never found the reason for it, though stress can be a cause.
Roberts became the 17th U.S. chief justice in September 2005, succeeding the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, whom he earlier had served as a law clerk. He is the youngest member of the Supreme Court. Roberts formerly worked in the U.S. Justice Department under President Ronald Reagan and President George H.W. Bush, and he was a federal appeals court judge in Washington before he was nominated to the nation’s highest court.
