WASHINGTON — As president of the State Bar of Texas, Harriet Miers wrote that "our legal community must reflect our population as a whole," and under her leadership the organization embraced racial and gender set-asides and set numerical targets to achieve that goal.

The Supreme Court nominee's words and actions from the early 1990s, when she held key leadership positions as president-elect and president of the state bar, provide the first window into her views on affirmative action, an area in which the Supreme Court is divided and where Miers could tip the court's balance.

Her tenure at the bar association also could provide new fodder for conservatives opposed to her nomination, as President Bush seeks to quell a rebellion on the right over his selection of Miers.

To some conservatives, the types of policies pursued by the Texas bar association amount to reverse discrimination. One of the chief complaints on the right against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was that he clashed with conservatives who wanted to take a harder line against affirmative action.

White House spokesman Jim Dyke said Miers' actions on the bar do not indicate how she might rule on the big question before the high court, which is how far government can go to promote diversity. "The best I can tell, this was a private-sector initiative to increase diversity, which is not the same thing as a government mandate of quotas," he said.

Miers, the first woman president of the Texas Bar, vowed in her first interview with the Texas Law Journal as president to "be inclusive of women and minorities."

During her tenure, she championed increasing the number of female and minority lawyers in the bar's leadership ranks and in law firms across the state, writing that "we are strongest capitalizing on the benefits of our diversity."

She and the board passed a resolution urging Texas law firms to set a goal of hiring one qualified minority lawyer for every 10 new associates. The board also restated support for a policy of setting aside a specific number of seats on the bar's board of directors for women and minorities.

Although Miers was not the author of either policy, board members who served with her said she fully supported both efforts.

As the first woman litigator at her law firm and the first female president of the Dallas and Texas bars, Miers had an understanding of the barriers faced by those who are not white males, said former board member James Parsons, who served with Miers when she was named the board's president-elect in 1991.

"When you come up hard like she did, you either pull the ladder up behind you or you leave the ladder down and reach back and pull people up," he said. "Harriet reached back; that's who she is."

Others see it differently.

"Those are quotas," said Roger Clegg, the general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative group opposed to affirmative action. The fact that Miers "did not create the quota systems but only perpetuated and endorsed it doesn't make it less disturbing," he said.

The primary mover behind the policy that set hiring goals was Gonzales. Back then, minorities made up less than 5 percent of the associates at the state's 18 largest law firms, according to board records.

The resolution called on firms to increase the number of minority lawyers by setting a goal that 10 percent of all newly hired associates over the next five years be minorities, provided they met the firms' hiring standards.