Court Nominee Was Part of Legal Team Seeking to Shift Course on Civil Rights Laws
Monday, August 1, 2005; A01
In the early 1980s, a young intellectual lawyer named John G. Roberts Jr. was part of the vanguard of a conservative political revolution in civil rights, advocating new legal theories and helping enforce the Reagan administration's effort to curtail the use of courts to remedy racial and sexual discrimination.
Just 26 when he joined the Justice Department as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith, Roberts was almost immediately entrusted to counsel senior department officials on such incendiary matters of the day as school desegregation, voting rules and government antidotes to bias in housing and hiring.
In prolific missives of a few pages and densely written 30-page legal memos, Roberts -- who co-workers recall had primary responsibility for civil rights matters in his office -- consistently sought to bolster the legal reasoning for the administration's new stances and to burnish its presentation of the policies to Congress and the public.
Roberts's record is being closely scrutinized, and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee say they will rigorously question the Supreme Court nominee on his views of civil rights. A review of Roberts's papers from his time at the Justice Department and interviews with his contemporaries show he was deeply involved with the Reagan administration's efforts to recast the way government and the courts approached civil rights.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/31/AR2005073100696.html
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