WASHINGTON -- The first stretch of the John G. Roberts Jr. paper trail available to the public is a short and not very winding road.

		Related coverage White House, Democrats spar over Roberts' memos

Judging from documents from Roberts' service as a special assistant to William French Smith, former President Ronald Reagan's first attorney general, Roberts arrived at the administration in 1981 -- after a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice William H. Rehnquist -- as a true believer in Reagan's views about the need for judicial restraint.

The twenty-something Roberts' jottings touch on several issues that are likely to arise in his Senate confirmation hearings for a seat on the Supreme Court. Two of the most significant are whether Congress has the power to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over some hot-button issues and whether gender discrimination is as offensive as racial discrimination.

Yesterday, at a satellite National Archives site in College Park, Md., reporters continued to paw through 18 cardboard boxes of interoffice mail, press clippings and even expense information from Roberts' service in 1981 and 1982 as Smith's subordinate.

In what for other young lawyers might have been a glorified internship, Roberts helped to ghostwrite speeches and articles for his boss and traded sophisticated arguments with conservative legal celebrities like Kenneth Starr and Charles Cooper.

The files also include Roberts' account of how he prepared Sandra Day O'Connor, the retiring justice he has been nominated to replace, for her 1981 Senate confirmation hearings. In a memo that may be quoted at his hearings, he told her "to avoid giving specific responses to any direct questions on legal issues likely to come before the court, but demonstrating in the response a firm command of the subject area and awareness of the relevant precedents and arguments."

Some issues the files mention have contemporary echoes. Assuming that they aren't overshadowed by documents from later in his career at the Reagan White House and in the George H.W. Bush Justice Department, the first installment offers several openings for Senate Democrats who want to establish whether Roberts is in the "mainstream."

"Court-stripping." Roberts' files indicate that he may have been more sympathetic than other Reagan officials to the notion that Congress could abolish the Supreme Court's jurisdiction over specific issues, like prayer in public schools and busing for desegregation.

Defenders of the idea, known in Washington as court-stripping, say it is authorized by language in the Constitution providing that "the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction both as to law and fact, with such exceptions and under such regulations as the Congress shall make."

Roberts scribbled "No!" in the margin of a memo by then-Assistant Attorney General Ted Olson arguing that court-stripping bills were unconstitutional. To Olson's suggestion that the Reagan administration would be well-received "in the press," Roberts wrote in the margin that "real courage would be to read the Constitution as it should be read and not kowtow" to liberal journalists and academics.

Court-stripping is again an issue in Congress, with some proposing that either lower federal courts or the Supreme Court or both be denied jurisdiction over lawsuits challenging the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance or over the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which limits marriage to unions between a man and a woman. Whether Roberts believed in the '80s or believes now that court-stripping is constitutional is likely to be part of the hearings inquiry.

Sex discrimination. Roberts wrote an Aug. 31, 1982, memo to the attorney general urging the Justice Department not appeal a district court's narrow interpretation of Title IX, a law that allowed for a federal funds cutoff to educational "programs" that discriminated against women. The lower court ruled, as the Supreme Court did in the 1984 Grove City College case, that Title IX was "program-specific," meaning federal funds could be withdrawn only from the specific department that discriminated.

Congress in 1988 overturned the Supreme Court's Grove City ruling by passing clarifying legislation, so the issue of Title IX's reach is moot. But senators may link Roberts' comments to a memo in his files in which he suggested the Justice Department not side with female inmates in a suit alleging some vocational training opportunities were available only to male prisoners.

The larger issue raised by Roberts' comments about sex discrimination is whether judges should view laws that discriminate by gender with the same "strict scrutiny" with which they review racial classifications. Although the Supreme Court has taken an increasingly suspicious view of gender discrimination -- for example, in a 1996 decision against the all-male Virginia Military Institute -- it has not held that racial and gender discrimination violate the 14th Amendment guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" in exactly the same way.

Affirmative action. Roberts' papers contain a memo criticizing a pro-affirmative action report by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. O'Connor wrote the majority opinion in a 2003 case when the court upheld, 5-4, racial preferences at the University of Michigan Law School.

Roberts' long-ago criticism of affirmative action as a social policy is not incompatible with finding as a judge that an affirmative action program like Michigan's is constitutional.