John G. Roberts will be seated as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court next week after depicting himself as an open-minded jurist, dismissing past controversial positions by saying that he was merely carrying out the orders of his superiors and politely refusing to answer questions that would have provided insight into his judicial philosophy.

Roberts was so effective shadowboxing with Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that in the end, three of them voted for him: Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and both Wisconsin senators, Russell D. Feingold and Herb Kohl. Even more Democrats are expected to support Roberts when the full Senate votes on the nomination this week.

While Roberts’ artful testimony before the Judiciary Committee may have left the impression that he is not a rigid conservative, his words and record provide a different portrait. For example, Kenneth L. Manning, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, presented a paper on Roberts earlier this month to the American Political Science Association. Titled, “How Right Is He: A Quantitative Analysis of the Ideology of Judge John G. Roberts,” the paper examined 190 decisions made during Roberts’ short tenure as a federal appeals judge and compared those averages to other federal appeals judges across the country.

In looking at Roberts’ record, it is important to remember that Republican-appointed judges dominate the federal judiciary at all levels. Therefore, his record was measured against a group that tilts to the Right.

“I find that Roberts is very conservative in his decision making in criminal justice disputes, and the data suggest that he is exceptionally conservative in civil liberties and rights cases (though the limited number of cases in this area restrict the ability to draw an firm conclusions),” Professor Manning wrote. “In labor and economic disputes, however, Judge Roberts has been more liberal than the appellate court average.”

A closer look at the research shows that Roberts cast a conservative vote in 67.1 percent of the cases that came before him, compared to a 58.9 percent group average for court of appeals judges. He cast liberal votes in 32.2 percent of the cases, almost 9 percent less than the 41.1 percent average for appellate judges.

In addition to his voting record, we also have Roberts’ written words. And contrary to his assertion that he was merely carrying out the wishes of his conservative supervisors in the Reagan Justice Department, Roberts’ writings reveal that he often advocated positions that were to the right of the department’s most ardent ideologues.

On Dec. 9, 1981, Roberts wrote a 27-page memorandum asserting that it was legal to remove the Supreme Court’s ability to consider cases that involve school desegregation, abortion and school prayer under the so-called “exception clause” to Article III, section 2 of the Constitution, the section governing Supreme Court jurisdiction. Another lawyer, Ted Olson, who would later become solicitor general, wrote that Roberts’ view “misperceives the proper role of constitutional interpretation” and offered a “greatly oversimplified and misleading view of the Constitution.”

In a memorandum on employment suits filed against Clayton and Gwinnett counties in Georgia, Roberts objected to a proposed settlement agreement that offered jobs and back pay not only to actual victims of discrimination, but to those that could show that they were deterred from applying because of discrimination. Roberts called that proposal “staggering.” He took the preposterous position that even if an employee had a “blanket policy of rejecting all blacks simply because they were black” they would not be violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act unless it could be proven that the rejected Blacks “were more qualified than white applicants who were hired.” Of course, federal employment laws do not require that African-Americans be “more qualified” than Whites in order to be hired.

Despite Supreme Court rulings to the contrary, Roberts argued in a Feb. 15, 1984 memo that federal courts could be stripped of their power in school desegregation cases to reassign students to other schools or to order bussing as a remedy to correct unconstitutional segregation. That, too, was an argument to the right of Ted Olson and other department conservatives.

Olson had written in one memo that opposition to court-stripping proposals would be viewed as a “courageous” act. Roberts wrote in the margin of the memo: “real courage would be to read the Constitution as it should be read and not kowtow” to progressives.

Now, 23 years later, it is not an issue of conservatives kowtowing to liberals. Rather, it is progressives lacking the backbone to stand up to conservatives.