US supreme court chief suffers seizure, fall

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Chief Justice John Roberts was out of danger and unharmed after a seizure and a fall Monday near his vacation home in the US state of Maine, the Supreme Court said in a statement. Appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005, Roberts, at 52, is the youngest of the nine justices on the high court. He was taken to hospital by ambulance to Penobscot Bay Medical Center in Rockport, Maine, examined and released, the statement from Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathleen Arberg said.
"The chief justice is fully recovered from the event" after suffering what doctors called a "benign idiopathic seizure," the Supreme Court said in a statement.
"He underwent a thorough neurological evaluation, which revealed no cause for concern," the statement added. Roberts will, however, stay at the hospital overnight.
"The chief justice experienced a similar event in 1993," the statement said. Roberts replaced conservative predecessor William Rehnquist, who died of thyroid cancer. Roberts was a clerk for Rehnquist, then a justice on the Supreme Court, after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1979. Rehnquist recommended Roberts replace him.
Before taking a judgeship on the US Court of Appeals in Washington, Roberts spent years in private practice and gained renown for intellectual prowess arguing close to 40 cases before the Supreme Court. Roberts was brought into the administration of president Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) in 1982. He started as a special assistant to the attorney general but became associate counsel to the president. Roberts' name sounded alarm bells among groups that support abortion rights and other key social issues dear to the Christian right.
In 1990, when a lawyer in the White House, he signed a brief urging the high court to overturn Roe versus Wade, the watershed 1973 case that made abortion a right.