After President Bush announced the nomination of Judge John Roberts Jr. to the Supreme Court last week, friends and colleagues rushed forward to gush about the straitlaced former litigator’s ample sense of humor. None, however, mentioned that he has sometimes trained that acerbic wit on the members of the high court.

As a young White House lawyer in the early 1980s, the future nominee ridiculed claims that the Supreme Court justices were overworked, suggesting instead that they lived a cushy life akin to that of schoolchildren.

“While some of the tales of woe emanating from the court are enough to bring tears to the eyes, it is true that only Supreme Court justices and schoolchildren are expected to and do take the entire summer off,” Judge Roberts wrote in a April 1983 memorandum to his boss, Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, about a proposal to create a new tribunal to relieve the perceived pressure on the high court.

The memo was among those obtained by The New York Sun last week from the archives at the Reagan library in Simi Valley, Calif.

In the writings, the 28-year-old attorney’s thoughts seem informed by his experience a few years earlier as a clerk to Associate Justice Rehnquist. The young lawyer expressed the view of many conservatives that the court was intruding too often into matters properly left to the president and the Congress. “Even assuming the justices have reached the limit of their capacity, it strikes me as misguided to take action to permit them to do more. There are practical limits on the capacity of the justices and those limits are a significant check preventing the court from usurping even more of the prerogatives of the other branches,” Judge Roberts wrote.

At the time, the idea of a new court to resolve conflicts between the circuits had the strong endorsement of Chief Justice Burger. Despite the high-powered backing, the future nominee showed no compunction about dismissing the concept as “exceedingly ill-advised.” In addition, Judge Roberts decried one of the Justice Department’s rationales for supporting the court as “a total abdication of reason.”

Judge Roberts also crafted another rhetorical zinger against the justices, two of whom remain on the court and may soon become colleagues, Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Stevens. “The generally accepted notion that the court can only hear roughly 150 cases each term gives the same sense of reassurance as the adjournment of the court in July, when we know the Constitution is safe for the summer,” he quipped.

A prominent Supreme Court historian, David Garrow of Emory University, said the 22-year-old memoranda offer keen insight into the judge’s personality and temperament. “What really comes through to me more than the substance is this outspokenly sarcastic, almost cutting sense of humor from someone who’s really a very junior person,” Mr. Garrow said. “Someone who has this sharp a sense of humor or is so willing to take outspoken pot-shots at sacred cows is not going to completely lose that in the intervening 20 years.”

Mr. Garrow said he was particularly struck by the future nominee’s comment about the Constitution being “safe for the summer.”

“That really is the first time we have seen Roberts make a comment that is Scalia- or Thomas-esque. Everything we’ve seen from this fellow up until now, he’s very understated,” the historian said.

In another memo on the same subject written in February 1983, Judge Roberts said flatly that if the Supreme Court was being crushed by its workload, it had no one to blame but its own members. “The fault lies with the justices themselves who unnecessarily take too many cases and issue opinions so confusing that they often do not even resolve the question presented,” the brash young lawyer wrote. “If the Justices truly think they are overworked, the cure lies close at hand. For example, giving coherence to Fourth Amendment jurisprudence by adopting the ‘good faith’ standard, and abdicating the role of fourth or fifth guesser in death penalty cases, would eliminate about a half-dozen argued cases from the court’s docket each term.”

Mr. Garrow said the comments from Judge Roberts about the Fourth Amendment and the death penalty represent opinions that were widely held at the time by both conservatives and moderates. In a case decided a year after that memo was written, the Supreme Court adopted on a 6-3 vote a rule that allowed admission of evidence that police seized in “good faith,” even if the search or seizure was ultimately deemed unconstitutional.

Little is known about Judge Roberts’s views on capital punishment, though some death penalty opponents have expressed hope that the judge’s strong Catholic faith might affect his stance on the issue. The young lawyer’s comments seem to indicate at least an acquiescence to the death penalty, but Mr. Garrow said it would be hard to draw further conclusions. “I wouldn’t necessarily say that means he’s pro-death penalty or a death penalty enthusiast,” the historian said.

Mr. Garrow said he suspected that Judge Roberts has become somewhat more discreet in his writings as it became more apparent that he might be destined for the federal bench.

In another part of the April memo, the future nominee frets that the new proposed tribunal, which would have been appointed by the Supreme Court from the existing bench, could strike down the opinions of conservative judges. “A Carter-appointed judge … could write a nationally binding opinion reversing an opinion by Bork, Winter, Posner, or Scalia – something that cannot happen now,” Judge Roberts wrote. He referred to Robert Bork, Ralph Winter, Richard Posner, and Justice Scalia, all of whom were appeals court judges at the time.

The tribunal, proposed as a five-year experiment, never got off the ground.