Asymmetrical Information

The President's primary concern seems to be to avoid conflict. I'm getting a vision of a Supreme Court that does nothing - and I like it.

Not as much as I like the vision of an Executive branch that does nothing, and nowhere near as much as I like the idea of a Legislative branch that does nothing.

I'm not comfortable with "nothing". I'd be happy if they just stuck to the "enumerated powers" and left the rest to us.

There's actually a lot of information beginning to float around the Blogosphere about her. Well, floating is probably not the right word. The Blogosphere now contains a lot of links to earlier articles about her.

Highlights: used to be a conservative Democrat in the 80's and then became a Republican.

Clerked for a federal judge after law school. Became the first woman hired by Locke Purnell Boren Laney & Neely, a venerable Dallas firm, and later was elected president of Locke Purnell in 1996, by then a 225-lawyer firm. Three years later, it merged with another powerhouse firm, and she became co-manager of Locke Liddell & Sapp.

She became president of the Dallas Bar Association in 1985, and in 1989 was elected to a two-year term as an at-large candidate on the Dallas City Council. Became president of the State Bar of Texas from 1992 to 1993.

Cleaned up the Texas Lottery Commission.

White House staff secretary and then deputy chief of staff. Then on to White House counsel, which is her current position.

She appears to be quite an accomplished woman.

All of those positions can be easily attained if you're a person of merely middling intellect who happens to be a crony of powerful people. People like, say, George W. Bush. Miers does not strike me as the best candidate for the position by any objective measure, much as Clarence Thomas wasn't when he was nominated. But the Miers nomination is of a piece with the current President Bush's cavalier handling of his responsibilities.

Yeah, As a SCOTUS wonk I was a bit surprised about this pick. There seems to be some reason to believe that she was choosen because she was one of the people who was un-filibusterable (is this a word?)

She's pro-civil rights (as far as I can tell) and has been active in the ABA (hardly a conservative organization). The Conservative attorneys in my office do not seem pleased about it, the liberals seem a little too pleased. I gather Reid already has supported her.

On the one hand, I think she was picked because she will get through. If the dems like her to conservatives won't have enough votes to block her. On the other hand I think it is a very poor choice as it just highlights the cronyism (sp?) in the Bush Administration, which has already been highlighted enough in recent weeks.

I agree, there are many conservative women who would be better for the court.

We can surmise that she's pro-life, since she contributed to Al Gore in 1988.

I'd recommend Beldar's blog for a good defense of her choice.

Rex: Compared to the average lawyer her accomplishments are impressive, but that's hardly a reasonable standard for a Supreme Court nominee.

The most popular ranking of law firms by prestige is done by Vault. It lists the top 100 firms in order. Locke doesn't even make the list. It also lists the top 10 firms by region. I could only check that list as recently as 2001 without paying, but at that time Locke wasn't even in the top 10 for Texas.

This woman is a third-rate lawyer from a third-rate firm and a third-rate law school (where she supposedly didn't even make law review). As Supreme Court nominees go, she far less accomplished than I ever thought possible. I've rarely been happy with Bush's presidency, but after today I'm on board with the loony leftists calling for his impeachment.

It may be that, as your post notes, we're unlikely to find out about Miers anytime soon, but it's surprising that you would link to the LATimes, hardly the place to look for anything more than the movie listings.

Xavier,

I didn't comment on her suitability for the position; just that there was actually more information available than people thought there was.

But going to some of your criticisms, I think that it is a major error to rank law firms the way you are, simply because the only criterion the rankers use is size. Locke was a 225 lawyer firm before their merger with Liddell Sapp--that's not small potatoes. From all indications, Miers is a smart attorney with some personality quirks. So?

Whether or not she will turn out to be a good pick or a bad pick is something we will know only in the future, as happens with all Supreme Court justices. I am deeply disappointed with Ruth Bader Ginsberg, for example. She votes like a liberal instead of a Supreme Court justice. I might disagree with some of Scalia's rulings, but at least he is grounded in the Constitution and not in his personal preferences.

Rex: It sounds like you're thinking of AmLaw 200. Vault doesn't rank based on size. It's a survey of prestige. It's far from perfect, but as a crude guide it definitely has merit. The fact that Locke doesn't even make the list is a pretty clear sign that's small potatoes. Wachtell is at the top of the list and it's a fairly small single-office firm. Locke is simply not a top-tier firm by any measurement. I certainly agree that Miers is a reasonably smart and competent attorney, but we're not talking about a disciplinary action for incompetence here. This is a Supreme Court nomination. Being reasonably smart and competent isn't even close to adequate. Given her background, her achievements are very impressive. She's probably accomplished more in her career than I ever will. But she's still embarrassingly far from qualified for SCOTUS.

I'm no Ginsburg fan either, but at least she earned her seat. I'd rather have a qualified justice who always votes against my interests than someone like Miers even though I suspect her policy preferences are extremely similar to mine.

Xavier wrote:

This woman is a third-rate lawyer from a third-rate firm and a third-rate law school (where she supposedly didn't even make law review).

So are we to believe then that Microsoft and Disney (two of Miers’ personal clients) were in the practice of retaining a “third-rate lawyer” from a “third-rate law firm” from a “third-rate law school” to handle their business?

BTW: Miers served as Comments Editor for the Southwestern Law Journal. How shocking that in displaying your ignorance of the woman’s qualification that you get even that basic fact wrong.

Thorley: I said she supposedly didn't make law review meaning that I had read on several sites that she didn't make law review. I had no reason to doubt them at the time, but apparently they were wrong and so was I. At best, it improves her resume from a D- to a D+.

And, yes, I do believe that Microsoft and Disney would hire a third-rate lawyer from a third-rate firm. They're big companies. They hire a lot of lawyers. Not all of them are winners. When big companies have an issue that requires a first-rate intellect or when the outcome is especially important, they go to a firm like Wachtell. When they have simple routine work and they're looking to cut corners on legal expenses, they go to a firm like Locke. They're not going to pay Wachtell fees for something a monkey could do and they're not going to entrust something important to a firm like Locke.

I thought that Locke Liddell was the second largest firm in Dallas. I don't know much about Texas firms, but Liddell Sapp (one of the mergees to Locke Liddell) was well respected and known in New York City, primarily through its association with Texas Commerce Bank (part of the Chemical Bank/Chase Manhattan/J.P. Morgan entity) when Solomon Brothers and Texas Commerce Bank developed and implemented CMO's.

I think some critics are being overly harsh on the lady. While it might be nice that she had some time on the appellate bench so that we could analyze her writings and opinions, I should remind people that Rhenquist didn't have any judicial experience before being appointed either.

The Supreme Court is big enough for all types, and I think we should keep in mind that a diverse court is better for the overall health of the country than a narrowly focused court. As a thought experiment, think of any one justice and then imagine the entire court of only that type. Not my idea of what I want as the third branch of government.

Here are two really, really uninformed comments:

"All of those positions can be easily attained if you're a person of merely middling intellect who happens to be a crony of powerful people." (from John)

and

"This woman is a third-rate lawyer from a third-rate firm and a third-rate law school (where she supposedly didn't even make law review)." (from Xavier).

Are either of you lawyers? Go to law school? Get hired by a major firm, make partner, survive a merger and be joint managing partner of a 450 plus lawyer firm? Not likely. There aren't any third rate lawyers, or even second rate, who make that cut and no one does what she did in private practice based on who they know. If you think otherwise, name the name.

A suggestion: stay with what you know. Locke, Liddell is a fine firm with a very sophisticated clientele and practice. Her career accomplishments dwarf someone whose life was spent in government or education because she competed in the real world market.

Fair questions about this or any other candidate include her grounding in constitutional law and whether she has the 'judicial temperament.' There is no record as yet either way, so no basis for praise or criticism.

Finally, after the Clinton joint presidency and as far back as Kennedy appointing his brother attorney general as a prequel to Bobby’s deification by the hard left, spare me the sanctimonious BS about cronyism.

An example of the “simple routine work” that a “monkey could do:”

Harriet Miers, who was nominated Monday to the high court, was involved with the case, titled "Microsoft Corp. v. Manning, et. al.," in 1995 as her firm, the Dallas-based Locke Purnell Rain Harrell, was hired to represent Microsoft.

"Harriet was always flying to Seattle [home of Microsoft]," Lawrence Littwin, the Texas Lottery director who Miers fired in 1997, told The Observer in an early 2001 story. (Miers had been appointed by Bush, then the governor of Texas, to serve as the chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission in early 1995.)

Miers filed a brief with the trial court -- which had taken up the class action suit again after an appellate court had refused Microsoft's request to "de-certify" the class-action suit, in other words to deny it class-action status -- and convinced the judge the previous decision was flawed.

Amongst other arguments, her brief stated that "the lower courts upheld certification without determining whether the novel theory of the case was proper for a class action suit."
Microsoft's idea, that only those people who had actually lost data, not the millions who had bought MS-DOS 6.0, had a right to sue, was upheld. After that, the class-action plaintiffs withdrew their suit.

During that time, a long-time friend, U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade of Dallas, recalled in a 2003 article for the Texas Lawyer, he had reached Miers on the phone years before when she said, "Ed, can you give me just a minute? I've got Mr. Gates on the line. I'm doing a little work for Microsoft."

Not bad for a “third-rate lawyer” from a “third-rate law firm” and a “third-rate law school.”

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