The Boston Globe strikes a few cautionary notes about Roberts’s Reagan Administration memoranda. The article begins:

Lawyers almost never speak for themselves. Private attorneys offer their clients’ views. Justice Department lawyers carry out the president’s policies. Trial judges follow precedents from higher courts. Even appeals-court judges usually incorporate their colleagues’ thinking into their written opinions.
The problem of how to separate a judicial nominee’s views from his employer’s did not start with John G. Roberts Jr., whose thousands of pages of papers from his years in President Reagan’s Justice Department have deluged the media in recent weeks. The question has hung over Supreme Court confirmation fights for decades, and the record suggests that anyone other than an academic has enough wiggle room to avoid being held responsible for his or her writings.