A Conservative Record, But Not in Lock Step

In 1976, Mukasey joined the law firm Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler, where he remained until assuming his judgeship in 1988. One of the firm's clients was the FBI Agents Association. He returned to the law firm as a partner when he retired from the bench last year.

It was during his time in the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office that Mukasey befriended Giuliani. Their friendship is close enough that Giuliani selected Mukasey to preside over his inauguration as mayor in 1994, even though it meant delaying the swearing-in by a day so that it would not fall on a Saturday, the Jewish sabbath.

Mukasey gave Giuliani's presidential campaign two contributions totaling $1,200 in March and June, and otherwise has made only one other donation, $1,000 to Lieberman, public records show.

Mukasey told the Senate in 1987, shortly after Reagan nominated him to the bench, that he had worked to get women admitted to the University Club of New York and that he ultimately resigned because it had voted not to do so. The vote "shows that sense and decency are not as common as I had thought," Mukasey said in a letter disclosed as part of his confirmation hearing at the time.

While a judge, Mukasey earned largely positive reviews, though a group of deputies from the U.S. Marshal's Service filed a grievance two years ago complaining, in part, about the frequent trips to Mukasey's weekend house on the eastern tip of Long Island. The complaint alleged that the judge and his wife often insisted on being driven there "in dangerous weather conditions." The grievance claimed that deputies "risked their lives for no other reason than a protectee's arbitrary desire to be chauffeured to their secondary residence."

But Ralph Rosado, a deputy who spent three years on the judge's detail, said that Mukasey was a pleasure to work with. "He was always respectful of his detail and very considerate," he said.

As a judge, Mukasey worked to keep references to his religion out of his courtroom, according to friends, colleagues and his rabbi. A former law clerk said Mukasey often dug up literary analogies for his opinions but steered clear of the Bible. Still, his faith was discussed more than once during terrorism trials in his court.

William M. Kunstler, a lawyer for one of the Muslim defendants in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, asked Mukasey to recuse himself from the case because he is Jewish. Kunstler accused the judge and his wife of having ties to Israel that would influence his opinions.

In his official response, Mukasey wrote that "to respond to such inquiries is to concede the relevance of the information" to the way he might rule from the bench. Kunstler's widow, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, said that she did not remember the incident but that Mukasey was one of the better judges that she and her husband appeared before during their years of defense work in New York.

Even on the cases that shed light on his ideology, Mukasey did not lean consistently to the right. In a 1994 ruling that has raised concerns among conservatives, he did not take a firm stance against abortion. In that case, he denied asylum to a Chinese national, Jia-Ging Dong, who had helped his wife try to elude Chinese officials who planned an abortion for her, because the couple had already exceeded the government's one-child rule.

With other New York judges in 2001, Mukasey signed hundreds of material-witness warrants, enabling the detention of hundreds of suspects on grounds that they had critical information about the 2001 attacks to relay to a grand jury. In the end, many were never called to testify.

Still, Mukasey told the Brooklyn law graduates: "Those people were not, as has been suggested, held incommunicado. Each of them had to be brought before the judge who issued the warrant, and each had the same right to a lawyer that a criminal defendant has."

In 2003, Mukasey ruled that the Bush administration had the authority to hold Padilla, a U.S. citizen initially suspected of plotting a "dirty bomb" attack, as an enemy combatant, without charging him. But he ruled, against the government's wishes, that Padilla was entitled to an attorney.

The Padilla case, Mukasey wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month, illustrates "the inadequacy of the current approach to terrorism prosecutions," because the administration was unable to use a confession he made in military custody without legal counsel.

Staff writers Robert Barnes, Alec MacGillis, Susan Schmidt and Michael A. Fletcher; staff researchers Madonna Lebling and Rena Kirsch; and research director Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.