Rulings by Mukasey Are Called Conservative, Fair

Michael B. Mukasey, who is President Bush's nominee to be attorney general, spent 18 years as a district judge in New York. (By Melina Mara -- The Washington Post)

Scott Horton, a former partner at Mukasey's law firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Taylor who specializes in human rights law, wrote on his blog at Harper's Web site that "civil libertarians will find no shortage of things to dislike about Michael Mukasey." Nonetheless, Horton enthusiastically endorsed Mukasey's nomination, calling him "not just a prominent judge, he is a judicious personality."

Despite Mukasey's conservatism, liberal advocacy and civil rights groups have signaled tentative support for the confirmation of the now-retired judge. "It's premature to endorse his confirmation," said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. "Early reports have been encouraging."

Henderson said he is concerned about Mukasey's past endorsement of the Bush administration's detention of immigrants as "material witnesses" to investigations into terrorism. "When it comes to his support of the mass roundup and detention of Arab, South Asian and Muslim men after 9/11, there are some real questions that can't be ignored," Henderson said.

Judith E. Schaeffer, legal director for the liberal People for the American Way, said her organization is not examining Mukasey's judicial opinions as much as his ties to Bush administration officials. "He's not being proposed for the Supreme Court or even the circuit court," she said. "Whether or not he is a political crony, whether he can be independent, is what we're looking at."

There are no statistics to show if Mukasey has been overturned more often than other judges, but Mukasey has had his share of important and colorful cases.

In 2004, he dismissed a class-action suit accusing an Italian insurance company of not paying benefits to victims of the Holocaust, saying the lawsuits were preempted by a Supreme Court decision. He decided copyright suits concerning the movie "Driving Miss Daisy" and concerning a toy bank that sounded like a toilet flushing when coins were inserted.

He overturned a Motion Picture Association of America ban on the dispatch of copies of movies to voters in the annual Academy Awards. He presided over trials of mob bosses and dirty cops, and showed a streak of judicial wit in a case pitting Coors Brewing Co. against Anheuser-Busch over what Coors called unfair advertising.

Though he sided with Anheuser-Busch, he declined to get involved in their fight over whether pasteurization affects the taste of beer. "De gustibus cerevesiae non scit lex," he wrote. Loosely translated from the Latin, it means "concerning the taste of beer law knows nothing."

Court records show that Mukasey could be biting when confronted with an argument he did not support. In 1996, Shilon Rogers filed a motion with Mukasey to suppress evidence, including a kilogram of cocaine, found when New York police searched her after stopping a cab in which she and a friend were riding in an isolated area of Harlem.

Police officers said they stopped the taxi because the driver flashed his headlights at them, signaling that he was in danger. Rogers argued that the stop resulted from racial profiling. "There is no basis in the record for these innuendos," Mukasey wrote. "They are odious, and they are rejected."

In the Sorlucco discrimination case in which he was twice reversed on appeal, Mukasey saw differently on practically every aspect of the case. He found that no "reasonable jury" could have deduced discrimination from the evidence presented. What he saw as perjury, the appeals court found to be "conflicting testimony."

Mukasey said the police department behaved properly. The appeals court wrote that it "tragically failed to show any sensitivity to the physical trauma and the resulting psychological manifestations commonly experienced by rape victims."

Researcher Madonna Lebling and Information Resources Director Lucy Shackelford contributed to this article.