WASHINGTON -- As Democratic senators renewed their call for the release of documents from Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr.'s days as deputy solicitor general in the first Bush administration, the National Archives yesterday made available 59 more documents from Roberts' earlier job as an aide to former President Ronald Reagan's first attorney general.

Like more voluminous files released last week, the papers made public yesterday show Roberts as skeptical about expansive definitions of racial and gender discrimination and in tune with the Reagan administration's critique of an "activist" federal judiciary. The documents, totaling 350 pages, date from Roberts' days as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith in 1981 and '82.

They show Roberts to have been enthusiastically involved in helping the Reagan administration defend controversial policies such as opposition to forced busing for school desegregation and an emphasis on halting intentional discrimination rather than policies that have a discriminatory effect.

Voting rights are a major theme in the documents released yesterday. In 1982, as Congress prepared to extend the 1965 Voting Rights Act, civil rights activists and Democrats called for the law to be amended to overrule a Supreme Court decision requiring proof of discriminatory intent to invalidate an election procedure that disadvantaged minority voters.

Although some in the Reagan administration were happy with the "intent" standard, Reagan on June 29, 1982, signed a compromise bill acceptable to civil rights leaders. But in a Sept. 14 memo to Smith, Roberts suggested that the Justice Department could use a voting-rights suit in Chicago to establish a narrower definition of discrimination than some civil rights activists preferred.

Roberts echoed a suggestion by Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds that the government should take the side of black and Hispanic voters in Chicago who had alleged that a City Council reapportionment had diluted their voting power.

Then Roberts wrote: "Although section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] does not, as you know, require proof of discriminatory intent, Brad Reynolds believes that the actions complained of in these suits -- redrawing districts to fragment black and Hispanic majorities -- were, in fact, based on discriminatory intent. He also believes that it is important for the department to participate in this litigation, so that we can more properly focus the private plaintiffs' allegations and in general have a major role in shaping judicial interpretations of the new section 2."

The documents released yesterday also include a memo from Roberts calling for a narrowing of the definition of sex discrimination under Title IX, a 1972 federal law that prohibits schools and college that receive federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex.