Window Into Miers' Legal Thinking in the 1990s Reflects a Glint of Liberal

[Omaha Steve]

October 14, 2005
latimes.com : National News

THE NATION
Window Into Miers' Legal Thinking in the 1990s Reflects a Glint of Liberalism

By Scott Gold and Richard A. Serrano, Times Staff Writers

HOUSTON — In the early 1990s, lawyer-bashing was all the rage. And Harriet Miers didn't like it one bit.

Then the president of the State Bar of Texas, Miers used her monthly column in the Texas Bar Journal to condemn politicians who were trying to score points by disparaging the legal profession. She suggested the criticism was myopic, and noted that it was coming, by and large, from Republicans.

It was time, she wrote, to "fight back."

The written record of President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court is meager. But her musings in the Texas Bar Journal in 1992 and 1993 offer a window into a different era for Miers.

At the time, she was perched atop a fractious organization of 55,000 lawyers that included law-and-order prosecutors, boardroom advisors and legal clinicians paid in chickens on the border. The crosscurrents were fierce, and Miers fought them by choosing a path that could safely be described as politically moderate and, at times, liberal — by Texas standards anyway.

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