A Charter Member of Reagan Vanguard

The Senate eventually backed the House version after then-Sen. Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) added a brief passage stating that the revisions were not intended to mandate "proportional representation" by minorities -- a viewpoint that backers of the House bill had insisted was already clear. It is not apparent from the disclosures so far what position Roberts took on that amendment, which Reagan said he supported after Dole introduced it.

A Less Expansive Title IX

Roberts's writings also show that he favored another pillar of the administration's new civil rights policies in education: an effort to limit the use of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which allows the government to withhold federal aid from schools that discriminate against women. Until then, Title IX had been interpreted to mean that all of a school's funding could be cut off if it discriminated at all, but Reagan officials rewrote the rules so that only the specific program found guilty of discrimination would lose money -- an interpretation that Congress later overruled.

During his second summer working for the attorney general, Roberts wrote Smith a memo on this topic, urging that the administration stand behind a lower court decision siding with the University of Richmond in a case brought by the Education Department for alleged sex discrimination in its sports programs.

"I strongly agree with [the] recommendation not to appeal" the court's decision that the university did not have to turn over athletic records to the government because its intercollegiate sports received no federal aid, Roberts wrote. "Under Title IX, federal investigators cannot rummage willy-nilly through institutions, but can only go as far as the federal funds go."

Marcia D. Greenberger, co-president of the liberal National Women's Law Center who has been litigating Title IX cases since the 1970s, said although the Richmond case had the specific effect of shielding intercollegiate sports from civil rights enforcement, it also had broad ripple effects on other discrimination cases -- of which, she said, Roberts doubtless was aware. "It was revolutionary to the way all of these civil rights statutes operated," she said.

The following year, Roberts argued against intervening in a sex discrimination case involving alleged disparities between training programs available to male and female prisoners in Kentucky. "If equal treatment is required, the end result in this time of tight state prison budgets may be no programs for anyone," he wrote.

"He basically implies that it would be too expensive to ensure equal treatment for women prisoners," said Debra Ness, president of the advocacy group Partnership for Women & Families. "The idea that financial interest would trump equality -- that's the same kind of thinking that reinforced a system of entrenched discrimination over decades."

Roberts's 27-page memo in 1982 arguing that Congress had power to strip the Supreme Court or the lower federal courts of jurisdiction over desegregation and other types of cases was prepared at the request of Starr and did not "purport to be an objective review of the issue," it said.

"Those who opposed busing were looking for ways to rein the courts in, and the most direct way was to have Congress strip the court of the ability to hear cases," said Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. "It was a radical proposal that even some of the most conservative members of the administration" -- such as then-Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Theodore B. Olson -- questioned.

"I remember talking to John about that," Fein said. "I said if the purpose of a stripping measure was to deny the Supreme Court the definitive word in interpreting a constitutional issue, that I thought that would be unconstitutional. He was much more open to the prospect." The administration eventually decided in favor of Olson, whom Fein said the "band of brothers" considered ideologically suspect because he was not consistently conservative enough.

The Post's news research staff contributed to this report.