WASHINGTON – The former U.S. solicitor general who authored a Reagan-era brief against the abortion ruling Roe v. Wade lashed out yesterday at one of the Democratic senators who will be voting on Judge Samuel Alito for saying the Supreme Court nominee should have told senators about work he did on the brief.

Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School and President Reagan’s lead attorney in front of the Supreme Court from 1985 to 1989, told The New York Sun that a 1985 memo in which a 35-year-old Samuel Alito offered him advice in arguing the administration’s case against Roe v. Wade does not qualify as the kind of work a nominee should send to the Judiciary Committee for review.

Democrats are making an issue of the document, which was released Wednesday by the National Archives, because they say it proves Judge Alito advised the Reagan administration in crafting legal arguments against Roe v. Wade. Mr. Fried ultimately rejected Judge Alito’s recommendations on how to approach the case, and the brief he submitted to the high court did not contain Judge Alito’s name.

“This is a real red herring because the solicitor general’s office is a small one,” Mr. Fried said. “We all helped each other and looked over each other’s work. He had no formal role in writing that brief, and I can’t imagine anything sillier than someone taking credit for a brief where that’s the role they had.”

Mr. Fried is one of seven former Republican and Democratic solicitors general who wrote a letter to the Judiciary Committee in 2002 arguing that memos from the office remain privileged.

Senator Schumer, a Democrat of New York, has led efforts to make more White House documents available. He said yesterday that the apparently accidental emergence of Judge Alito’s 1985 abortion memo bolsters his case.

“I hope that Judge Alito will provide an explanation for this omission and also any other cases he worked on during his time in the solicitor general’s office,” Mr. Schumer said. “The American people are entitled to know his views on all constitutional matters, not just the ones that the administration cherry-picks.”

A spokesman for the White House, Stephen Schmidt, said it is not “standard practice” to provide the Judiciary Committee with briefs for which judicial nominees offered advice.

The Judiciary Committee questionnaire asks nominees to provide copies “of any briefs, amicus or otherwise … in connection with your practice.”

“It’s clear that Senator Schumer has no intention of giving any consideration to Judge Alito’s confirmation and that he plans to vote ‘no’ as he did with Judge Roberts,” Mr. Schmidt said. “If the memo was included, the letter we would have received from Senator Schumer would have been an accusation of resume inflation.”

How the abortion memo made it into the public domain is not clear. A spokesman for the Department of Justice, John Nowacki, said it was found among papers from 22,000 boxes that were sent to the National Archives in 1999 as part of a “routine transfer.”

Once privileged documents arrive at the archive, Mr. Nowacki said, the privilege is lifted. One possible explanation is that lawyers in the Clinton administration, knowing that Judge Alito would have been on a short list of nominees in a Republican administration, released the documents ahead of time.

“Anybody who would have been nominated by Bush 41 for the appellate bench was a possible Supreme Court nominee,” a veteran Republican operative who asked not to be named, said. “You can just take a look at who the stars and superstars are by their academic records and career paths.”

A former assistant attorney general under President Reagan, Charles Cooper, said the existence of the 1985 memo was likely a surprise to the White House.

“This memo was definitely a mistake because it was an internal solicitor general’s memo,” Mr. Cooper said. “Those are never produced in response to Freedom of Information requests. I don’t have any personal knowledge of exactly how that brief was prepared, but I certainly have knowledge of the players involved. I know Sam Alito well, and he is utterly without guile.”

Mr. Fried, who supports abortion rights, said that while he does not think memos from the solicitor general’s office should be released, he also thinks Judge Alito was not being furtive in not mentioning his work on the 1985 abortion brief.

“I have never head of anyone who worked in the solicitor general’s office who would list all the cases where they wrote memos,” Mr. Fried said. “There are hundreds of these. It’s just absurd. It’s one of these typical cases, and I’m afraid Senator Schumer is guilty of this, that if you can’t get someone on the merits, you bring up some phony lack of candor argument. He should be ashamed of himself, but he is shameless. And you can quote me on that.”