No Easy Verdict on Thompson The Lawyer

"There will always be a concern that he wants to be the leader of the cobra party, and he was, for a while, a mongoose," said Grover Norquist, head of the Americans for Tax Reform, which supported tort reform and is influential in GOP circles. "He needs to articulate not where he was while practicing law under the tort laws at the time but where he think those laws should go now."

Thompson recently sought to head off attacks, posting a statement on a conservative blog explaining his opposition to federal limits on malpractice lawsuits by saying it is a matter best left to states.

"In the past, those who want to solve this problem have tended to ignore our Federalist tradition," Thompson wrote last month. "They've driven right past their statehouses to their airports and flown to Washington to ask for national legal remedies. Fortunately, now we're seeing that states can take effective action themselves."

Thompson cited as a model he could support the 2003 law in Texas that imposed state limits on malpractice lawsuit awards, which Norquist regards as "the gold standard of state-level tort reform."

Advisers say Thompson has long thought that the federal government ought to be as small and unintrusive as possible, and should leave solutions to local problems to local government except in cases such as terrorism, when a national effort is needed. He has held that view firmly even in the face of politically popular legislation, such as the time Thompson opposed requiring states to adopt federal sentencing guidelines to keep their crime-fighting money.

"State sentencing for state crime is a state matter," he argued in 1999. His views sometimes left him at the lone end of 99 to 1 Senate votes.

Thompson defied Republican orthodoxy almost as soon as he arrived in Washington in 1995 as a freshman senator. Having just regained control of Congress, the party was pursuing the agenda it had set out in the Contract With America.

That included proposals to limit the ability of lawyers to bring lawsuits, cap the size of damages that could be won and limit the fees that lawyers could earn in civil cases. "This is the only provision in the Contract With America that goes against our basic philosophy," he declared at the time.

Thompson broke with his party during the early debate to vote against several provisions. One would have required attorneys to tell clients that they were entitled to an upfront estimate of their legal fees and another that would have limited attorneys' fees.

He eventually joined Republicans in approving moderate new restrictions on product-liability lawsuits -- but only after several tougher provisions opposed by lawyers and consumer groups were stripped.

Thompson justified his vote on the grounds that products crossing state lines fall under the federal government's regulation of interstate commerce. But he continued to strongly oppose efforts to put limits on medical malpractice awards in states, at times citing stories of victims such as a 5-year-old girl who died after having her tonsils taken out.

In 1998, Thompson voted against a plan offered by Republicans that would have limited to $250 per hour the amount that lawyers could charge in tobacco lawsuits. He voted against similar curbs for lawyer fees in death-penalty cases, medical-malpractice cases and drug-patent litigation. He viewed such government limits as interfering with local commerce.