WP: In '81, Roberts Offered Counsel to O'Connor (more documents released)

In '81, Roberts Offered Counsel to O'Connor
As Aide to Attorney General, He Urged Nominee to Be Reserved in Sharing Legal Views

By Jo Becker and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, August 11, 2005; Page A07


Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. once urged a previous nominee, Sandra Day O'Connor, not to tell members of Congress how she might vote in cases likely to come before the court.

In a memo written on the eve of O'Connor's Senate confirmation hearings in 1981, Roberts -- then a senior aide to the attorney general helping prepare her -- told her that answering such questions would create an "appearance of impropriety" because her answers might be seen as prejudicing the outcome of cases not yet argued before the court on which she would serve.

The memo appears to raise the possibility that Roberts will himself be reluctant to be pinned down on specific cases during confirmation hearings slated to begin Sept. 6. It is one of several hundred disclosed late yesterday on the National Archives and Records Administration Web site that reflect his outlook regarding what a justice should say or do.

"The proposition that the only way Senators can ascertain a nominee's views is through questions on specific cases should be rejected," Roberts told O'Connor in the Sept. 9 memo. He and a colleague in the attorney general's office also helped her strategize about how to avoid expressing her views on abortion -- a topic expected to figure prominently in Roberts's own confirmation hearings....

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Other documents released last night, also spanning 16 months in 1981 and 1982 during which Roberts was a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith, add new details that illustrate the depth of Roberts's involvement in high-profile controversies over civil rights during the early Reagan years....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/10/AR2005081002182.html?sub=AR