Roberts Backed Limits on Bias

A Charter Member of Reagan Vanguard
Court Nominee Was Part of Legal Team Seeking to Shift Course on Civil Rights Laws

By R. Jeffrey Smith, Amy Goldstein and Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, August 1, 2005; Page A01

In the early 1980s, a young intellectual lawyer named John G. Roberts Jr. was part of the vanguard of a conservative political revolution in civil rights, advocating new legal theories and helping enforce the Reagan administration's effort to curtail the use of courts to remedy racial and sexual discrimination.

Just 26 when he joined the Justice Department as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith, Roberts was almost immediately entrusted to counsel senior department officials on such incendiary matters of the day as school desegregation, voting rules and government antidotes to bias in housing and hiring.