Midwestern Scholar With a Steady Conservative Bent

Sydney Nathans, a Duke University history professor whose own book on Webster is cited as a reference in Roberts's work, said the paper "signifies that, very early on, he was interested in the history of other conservatives like himself and was trying to get perspective on how a conservative operates in society. . . . [It] explore[s] the way in which other people who had core values found ways to express them in politics and law."

Out of sync as he was with Harvard's politics, Roberts liked its intellectual rigor and Eastern formalism, his friends recall. Roberts interviewed at Stanford Law School and returned disenchanted. His interviewer had worn sandals and no tie, Bush said. "It sort of upset his view of proper decorum."

The Quiet Dissenter

Harvard Law School, according to Charles Ogletree, who was two years ahead of Roberts and would eventually become one of its few black professors, was a place where students would jog along the river or enjoy a slice of pizza in the afternoon "and find themselves in intense debates about whether persons who had choked on a fish bone at a seafood restaurant had a right to sue the owner or whether their own negligence in not spotting the bone prevented them from succeeding in a law suit."

At a time when across the Charles River, Boston was angrily divided by race over a federal school busing order, Ogletree wrote in his memoir, "All Deliberate Speed," "Our classrooms were soundproof."

But while it wasn't the '60s, activism lingered. Students protested that only three of the approximately 70 law faculty members were female and three were black. The night in 1977 that then-Chief Justice Warren E. Burger had been scheduled to appear at the annual moot court competition, more than 100 people demonstrated in the rain against what they regarded as the Supreme Court's "repressive" civil rights policies. Other liberal activists at the school demonstrated against the Supreme Court's 1978 decision in the Allan Bakke case, in which the court sided with a white University of California medical school applicant who had sued over what he considered "reverse discrimination" favoring minorities in the university's admissions process.

Roberts dissented, friends knew, from such liberal orthodoxy. "John believed in merit. I don't think he believed in special preferences for folks," Scherer said. Roberts also preferred small government and, in class, challenged Fourth Amendment search and seizure rules, as well as raised the notion of a flat tax to replace the country's progressive tax system, Scherer added.

"There were a handful of people in law school who one knew were conservative and identified themselves as Republicans," and Roberts was one, according to Richard Lazarus, a law classmate who would later room with him in Washington.

But he was not particularly vocal in his beliefs. Harvard Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe, who gave Roberts a grade of A- in a course on constitutional law, recalls his student as "very quiet in class. . . . It was a period in which conservatives, self-identified or self-conscious, would have been inclined not to be very vocal at the school."

Conservatism, in fact, was just beginning to stir there. Some students founded a journal dedicated to countering what they regarded as judicial activism, but Roberts did not write for it. He "just didn't have time for us," said Vernon R. Proctor, one of its founders.

Instead, Roberts threw himself with vigor into the prestigious Harvard Law Review, which consumed as much as 50 hours a week his last two years.

Said David Leebron, the law review president in 1979 and now president of Rice University in Houston: "Our year wasn't a highly political year."

The Republican Apprentice

By 1980, when Roberts moved to Washington to become a clerk for Justice William H. Rehnquist, his views began to flower more openly. That fall, as Ronald Reagan campaigned successfully for president, Roberts placed an elephant -- the symbol of the GOP -- atop the television in the townhouse he shared with Lazarus. After the election, Lazarus recalled, "John mostly defended Reagan administration policies."

His clerkship with Rehnquist steeped him in legal thought of the right. That year, Rehnquist wrote majority opinions that upheld a requirement for draft registration by men alone and upholding a California court's decision that only males could be held liable for statutory rape, while he wrote dissents that supported searches of automobiles and homes without a warrant and opposed a lawsuit by female prison guards for equal pay.

By the summer of 1981, Roberts had moved on to become a special assistant to Reagan's attorney general. Two months into the job, he wrote a note to his immediate supervisor, Kenneth W. Starr, recommending that he hire Dean Colson, a fellow clerk for Rehnquist, and Stephen Galebach, one of the small nucleus of conservative classmates from Harvard Law. Roberts's descriptions of them could easily have been of himself.

Colson, Roberts told Starr, "combines intellectual power with a pleasant political style, making him well-suited for dealing with entrenched bureaucrats of opposing views." As for Galebach, he wrote, his classmate was "an articulate spokesman for strongly conservative views, which he was not afraid to express openly despite the hostility of 90 percent of his audience."

Research editor Lucy Shackelford and special correspondent Lauren Schuker in Cambridge, Mass., contributed to this article.