As a Lawyer, Miers Focused on Policy

"For her, procedure was an orderly way to get to a result," he said. "She was not a 'gotcha' lawyer. She certainly represented her client. The argument was heated and sharp. She certainly never gave an inch on that. But it was a merits-based issue."

Legal scholars caution that Miers's work as a lawyer cannot really give a clear indication of what she would do as a judge.

"The thing that makes lawyering very, very strange is that lawyers don't have to believe their arguments," said Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas. "All they have to believe is that the argument is professionally acceptable. No other profession has such a casual regard toward its arguments."

Levinson was one of several lawyers who faced off against Miers in a suit in 2000 after the disputed presidential election.

Three Texas voters sued Bush, alleging that both he and Richard B. Cheney were from Texas and therefore Texas's electoral college delegates could not vote for both of them. The case hinged on an obscure section of the 12th Amendment, which has never been invoked.

Levinson, who described the case as a "law professor's dream," said that part of what made the case fun for him was that he could argue the case like a Republican, meaning that he and his colleagues based the case on a narrow reading of the Constitution going back to the Framers' original intent. Miers took the opposite tack, sounding more like a liberal, arguing in her brief to the court for a "broad and inclusive" interpretation of the Constitution based on the belief that the clause makes no sense in today's world. She simultaneously focused on technicalities -- Cheney had forwarded his mail to Wyoming from his Dallas home and canceled his Texas driver's license.

Levinson said that to extrapolate from this case that Miers was a closet liberal would be a mistake. "This is a person who has almost no experience doing constitutional law, and the one case she is involved with is on a subject almost no one has talked about, at a time of extraordinary partisan interest," he said. "The only thing to infer from this is that she's a good lawyer." A federal judge dismissed the case on Dec. 1, 2000, the day it was filed.

Miers's pro bono work reveals a woman dedicated to fighting for legal representation for everyone. "We can and should play an important role in addressing the complex issues of delivery of services of all description to the poor," she wrote in a 1992 editorial in the Texas Bar Journal, while she was president of the State Bar of Texas.

She was one of the main backers of an initiative to establish legal clinics in poor neighborhoods in Dallas, and she spent many hours volunteering for Legal Aid of North Texas, where Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a healthy majority. In her first visit before a federal appeals judge in 1981, she represented a 32-year-old nurse's aide who argued that she was disabled and deserved Social Security payments. Miers lost. In another case, she represented the grandmother of a 3-year-old boy who was suing the boy's mother for child support. The court issued an arrest warrant for the mother.

The only case that appeared in an extensive search of court records showing pro bono work for a cause closer to conservative hearts was a 1993 case in which she defended a religious group against a suit from a donor. The donor said he had given about $100,000 to Pioneer Bible Translators, which translates Bibles and sends them overseas. Then he discovered that his wife had been molested by a charity official. Miers, who sat on the board of the charity, won, and the charity kept the donation. The only other time Miers, a born-again Christian, appears to have wrangled with religion in the courtroom was when she defended an insurer for the Catholic Church as it sought to limit its portion of a judgment won by abuse victims of a Dallas area priest.

Lawyers in Texas describe Miers as someone who prepared intensely for her cases and fought hard. They noted that her don't-suffer-fools-gladly style often played better in front of a judge than in front of a jury. Cross-examination was not her strong suit, they said, but her legal briefs were flawlessly prepared.

Mike Miller, a lawyer from East Texas, described the feeling when he learned Miers had entered his case -- a class-action suit of car buyers against Texas automobile dealers. Miers was representing the dealers.

"It was mixed," he said. "It's like seeing your mother-in-law drive off a cliff in your brand-new Mercedes. There are advantages. You don't have to worry about someone lying to you. You are not going to fight over anything that's a waste of time. The issues won't be frivolous. But you know you're in for a fight."