WASHINGTON -- With confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr scheduled to begin Jan. 9, the National Archives yesterday released 291 pages of Justice Department files relating to the judge.

But the 17 documents shed little new light on his views in the 1980s, when he served under President Ronald Reagan as an assistant to the U.S. solicitor general and later as a deputy assistant attorney general.

The documents, available on the National Archives' Web site at www.archives.gov/news/samuel-alito, come from the files of other Justice Department officials during the Reagan administration. The documents cover issues ranging from the department's litigation strategy in cases before the Supreme Court to the propriety of providing government transportation for the wife of then-Attorney General Edwin Meese.

The documents in yesterday's release most likely to figure in questioning of Judge Alito during the upcoming Senate Judiciary Committee hearings deal with matters already on the public record.

One is a brief he signed in which the Reagan administration urged the court to overturn a Michigan school district's policy of considering race as well as seniority in laying off teachers. The other is brief asking the court to rule -- as it later did -- that the work product of government attorneys can be withheld under the Freedom of Information Act, even if the litigation in question has ended.