WASHINGTON – President Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers, won’t be ready for a confirmation hearing November 7 because she “needs some time to learn” about landmark constitutional cases, Senator Schumer said yesterday.

Mr. Schumer, a Democrat of New York who sits on the Judiciary Committee that will grill Ms. Miers, met with her yesterday and emerged to tell reporters that she claimed she had never discussed the Supreme Court case that struck down anti-abortion laws, Roe v. Wade, with anyone in a three-decade legal career. He said she told him that she will have to think about whether she supports Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 privacy case that established the legal groundwork for the later abortion ruling.

Ms. Miers’s discussion with Mr. Schumer took place yesterday as the White House sought to build support for the nomination by inviting six former members of the Texas Supreme Court to Washington to speak favorably about Ms. Miers’s professional work and judicial temperament. It also came as speculation about her views on abortion law was stoked by an article on the Web site of the Wall Street Journal editorial page that quoted from notes of a conference call in which two Texas judges assured participants that Ms. Miers would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

“I did ask counsel Miers whether she had discussed her views on Roe v. Wade with either Judge Kinkeade or Judge Hecht,” Mr. Schumer said. “She said that no, she had not. She said, ‘No one knows my views on Roe v. Wade.’ She said, ‘No one could speak for me on Roe v. Wade.’ So if the article is correct … where these two judges, both of whom have known her a long time, assured the people on the telephone that they knew how she would vote, she disavowed that.”

Mr. Schumer cast his talk with Ms. Miers as unproductive, saying he did not learn much about her views on major Supreme Court cases related to privacy or her judicial philosophy. Senator Specter, a Republican of Pennsylvania who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said later that afternoon that Ms. Miers told him she regards one of the cases mentioned by Mr. Schumer, Griswold v. Connecticut, as settled law, though one of his aides later retracted the statement. A nominee’s views on that case are thought to augur his or her views on Roe v. Wade.

“I’m going to give her a break,” Mr. Schumer said. “She’s not a constitutional lawyer; she never purported to be a constitutional lawyer. But she clearly needs some time to learn about these cases, to become familiar with these cases, and then give the American people her views.”

Mr. Schumer, who met three times with Chief Justice Roberts before voting against him, said he requested a second interview with Ms. Miers and that she accepted “graciously.” He said he does not think Ms. Miers is ready to sit for a hearing as early as November 7, a date proposed by some Republicans. Democrats could benefit from a protracted review period, with conservatives fighting among themselves about Ms. Miers.

The White House on Friday began to retreat from its early emphasis on the White House counsel’s evangelical Christian faith by lining up more than a dozen surrogates to speak to the press and scheduling a press conference with six active and retired Texas judges who were asked to stress Ms. Miers’s professional accomplishments and intellectual heft.

The OpinionJournal.com article, by John Fund, caused a stir on Capitol Hill because it seemed to confirm the suspicion of many liberals and conservatives that the White House was promoting Ms. Miers among traditional allies with private assurances of how she would vote even as a consensus view has formed among Democrats and Republicans in the Senate that neither party should extract promises from a nominee about how he or she will rule on future cases.

A Texas Supreme Court justice who is mentioned in the article as reassuring participants on the call, Nathan Hecht, said yesterday he has never discussed Roe v. Wade in more than 30 years of friendship with Ms. Miers. Judge Hecht said that he said nothing in the call that he did not also say to reporters dozens of times over the next few days. He predicted that the article, which was based on anonymous notes, will have “zero effect” on Ms. Miers’s confirmation hearing.

“I think this is all very unfair,” Judge Hecht told The New York Sun. “I just marvel that we hear about unnamed Republican Senate staffers and unnamed Republican persons at the White House, and here’s another unnamed source with unedited notes that stirs up a bunch of smoke that has nothing to do with this lady’s credentials. It’s a marvel to me that after two weeks we’re not talking about the substance of it; we’re still talking about these sidebars, and the worst kinds of sidebars – it’s all anonymous.”

Asked whether he thought it was odd that Ms. Miers had never discussed Roe v. Wade with him, Judge Hecht made a distinction between her views on abortion and her views on the specific case, which grew out of a Texas case that made its way to the Supreme Court while Ms. Miers was a clerk for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

“In 30 years we may have talked about it,” Judge Hecht said. “But I don’t have any recollections of any conversations that would give me the slightest clue as to what she thinks about it because the case is just different from the social issue … until you’re there and you’re hearing the arguments.”

He said she is “pro-life.”