It sheds no light whatsover. We are looking for a smoking pen, and so far, and the only times we find her with ink on her fingers, she has been doodling love-notes to Bush and the bar association.
Only in the eyes of the blind man. That would be you.
Wael, at least she didn't eschew them.
Can she write? Does her bar journal column show a blunt intellect?
Sample comment from a trial lawyer's blog:
Since so many of Ms. Miers' critics are painting these really broad caricatures of her anyway, let's start with her work for The Mouse. In Disney Enterprises, Inc. v. Esprit Finance, Inc., 981 S.W.2d 25 (Tex. App.—San Antonio 1998, pet. dism'd w.o.j.), the key issue was whether a wholly owned Disney subsidiary incorporated in Delaware could be subjected to the personal jurisdiction of the Texas courts. That in turn took the case into a thicket of both constitutional and nonconstitutional issues — including an analysis of whether there were sufficient "minimum contacts" between the subsidiary and Texas so that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment would not be violated by forcing that subsidiary to respond to a lawsuit in the Texas courts. And that in turn depended on a complicated mix of factual and legal issues involving both agency and contract law. Ms. Miers lost on the personal jurisdiction issue at the trial court level, but then took an extraordinary interlocutory appeal, and won in the San Antonio Court of Appeals. Although her opponents tried to persuade the Texas Supreme Court to hear the case, Ms. Miers apparently persuaded that court to decline to hear it on jurisdictional grounds — meaning, in all probability, that she filed a persuasive brief in the Texas Supreme Court, and then did not have to appear for oral arguments on the merits (and risk losing) precisely because her brief was so persuasive.
(Now how stupid was that, writing such a good brief? Sheesh. If she'd just blown it, and as a result the Texas Supreme Court had taken the case, then she could tell all her critics now that she'd at least argued a case in the Texas Supreme Court. No foresight, this Miers woman. Altogether too focused on what her clients' needs are. How's she ever going to get ahead in the grand game of Beltway Lawyer-Snark if she acts like that?)
Well, anyway: How big a challenge was this case, then? What does it say about Harriet Miers and her intellect and her skills? Some may say that this was "meat and potatoes" stuff, even on the constitutional issues, and it's not the sort of case that was likely to make it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. But nevertheless, it obviously was complicated enough to perplex the trial judge, who (according to the appellate court) got it wrong. It was a close enough case that Ms. Miers' opponents thought they had a shot at getting the Texas Supreme Court to hear it, even after losing at the court of appeals level. The facts and law were complicated enough that this case would have made a reasonably good law school exam question. And I'm reasonably sure that to Ms. Miers' corporate client, getting this six- or maybe seven-figure fraud case thrown out of what it would have regarded as a hostile, pro-plaintiff venue — the famously dusty streets of Laredo in Webb County, Texas — was a pretty significant victory.
Why are the smoking pens so hard to find? Visit the blogger's site: A Westlaw Romp Through Harriet Miers Record