Despite her lack of any record, Harriet Miers may be God's gift to constitutional law. How can we tell? Well, you could give her a test. Seriously. Instead of asking political-spin questions about abortion, somebody on the Judiciary Committee ought to ask her some tough exam questions from smart Con Law professors. She doesn't even have to say what her own position would be, simply to accurately explain different views of the law. Unfortunately, the Judiciary Committee isn't exactly made up of smart Con Law professors--so grading would be a problem.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 05, 2005 • Comments
Harriet Miers was a math major at SMU. What does that mean? I checked the SMU catalogue for her era.
To major in math, students had to take one semester of Advanced Calculus (the catalogue lists no non-Advanced Calculus, so I take this to be what was known at Princeton as "freshman calculus"), Differential Equations, Introduction to Linear Algebra, and "nine additional semester-hours of advanced work in the department or in physics." The math department's advanced courses included a second semester of calculus, several actuarial and finance-oriented courses, College Geometry ("modern synthetica plane geometry...a continuation of classical high school geometry"), probability and statistics, the Teaching of Mathematics, Introduction to Modern Algebra ("an introduction to the principal modern algebraic systems; integral domains; groups, rings, and fields"), and a directed readings option. The department also offered a number of high-school-level algebra, geometry, and trig courses, though presumably majors took a more demanding curriculum. Grad courses were also open to seniors.
UPDATE: Here's a PDF file of SMU's math curriculum when Miers was an undergrad.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 05, 2005 • Comments
After reading this Hit and Run post and the comments that followed, it's clear that a lot of people have absolutely no idea what Harriet Miers's graduation from Southern Methodist University and SMU Law School suggests about her brainpower or academic record.
It does not, first of all, imply that she "could not get into" a school with a national reputation. Until very, very recently, southerners--even incredibly smart southerners--almost never considered leaving the region to go to college. (The exceptions were a few legacies from prep-school-oriented families.) For a bright woman in the early 1960s, a good private school like SMU would have been plenty ambitious. In Dallas, people today are still impressed by an SMU degree and even more by an SMU Law School degree. And, aside from her White House stint, Miers has spent her life in Dallas.
In Miers's day, SMU was a predominantly female undergraduate institution with an almost entirely male law school. Then, as now, it was a rich kids' school, a lot like the University of Southern California until recently. You can get a fine education there, but too few students bother. (To upgrade its program, the university has in recent years aggressively recruited scholarship students.) Miers appears to have been an unusually serious SMU student and, as far as I can tell from the one yearbook from her undergrad days left in the SMU library, she did not join a sorority--which would make her quite unusual. Kids at SMU take partying much more seriously than they take academics. (I often joke that while the UCLA library has many more books, the great thing about SMU's library is that none of the books are ever checked out.) From her academic record alone, it's clear that Miers is a self-directed person who does not simply follow the crowd.
But I'm still not impressed. SMU, which provides most of the Postrel family income, is a decent school. But it is not a place that demands that a student stretch her mind. Miers has never been in a scholarly environment where she was surrounded by people who were smarter than she and just as hard working. She has had a demanding, successful career in a fairly parochial environment where she could easily impress people. And she appears to be a legal technician, not part of the cosmopolitan debate over legal ideas, a debate that emphatically includes conservative voices.
Maybe the Supreme Court needs parochial judges--though David Souter already fills that role--just as it arguably needs people who've practiced law. But I'm skeptical
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 05, 2005 • Comments
Manolo makes me laugh out loud.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 03, 2005 • Comments
In 1991, the Dallas Morning News did a Q&A with Harriet Miers, as part of a regular feature on local celebs. Asked what people say about her behind her back, she replied, "They can't figure me out." A stealth nominee with no particular judicial philosophy? Or just not the typical Park Cities matron?
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 03, 2005 • Comments
The long Dallas Morning News profile of Harriet Miers offers assorted interesting tidbits: Her brothers--Robert Lee Miers and Jeb Stuart Miers--are named after Confederate generals and one of them, Jeb, is married to a state appellate judge. Her fantasy dinner party guests would be "the Apostle Paul, Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher." She "has dated Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht for years." As a young woman, she never wanted to be a judge but, says a fellow law clerk, "was intent on being a person who helped solve problems in society." She's a great bowler. And then there's this:
Longtime friend Merrie Spaeth, a Dallas communications consultant, said one of the most remarkable things is how discreet Ms. Miers is, how she holds her tongue even in private, when friends and political allies let down their hair.
"Not only did Harriet never tell a joke, she never laughed. She might smile so she didn't look stern. But she would never say anything snide," Ms. Spaeth said.
"In the 22 years I've known here I've never heard her use a curse word. Not even 'hell' or 'damn.' I've never heard her gossip. I've never heard her say a nasty word."
I'm sure she's ladylike yet tough as nails. But that doesn't make her qualified for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 03, 2005 • Comments
In more terrific (and hopeful) Latin American coverage from the LAT, Henry Chu tells the story of how an illiterate Brazilian laborer built a 10,000-volume community library in his favela.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 03, 2005 • Comments
The Mexican avocado industry is booming, thanks to the combination of free trade and rapidly growing U.S. demand. And despite U.S. growers' attempts to block over-the-border competition, that growth doesn't appear to be hurting the domestic industry. (A rising tide and all that.) The LAT's Chris Kraul reports:
Perez's crop is but a trickle in a river of avocados flooding the United States from Mexico, where exports have more than doubled in volume this year over last. The reason? Growers finally have attained unimpeded entree to the U.S. market after eight decades of barriers. Many packing houses are working multiple shifts to feed U.S. avocado demand, which is growing 15% a year.
"It is going to remain this way," Perez said. The opening of the U.S. market "has changed the industry for good."
So sure are Perez and partner Miguel Torres of a continuing bonanza that they hired 20 additional workers this year--a 50% bumping up of the payroll--and invested $4 million in a computerized sorting system to more efficiently box their Senor Avo brand of fruit.
What's driving growth in avocado exports is the elimination of trade barriers and sanitary bans that for most of the last century kept the U.S. market off limits to Mexican fruit. The boost also is thanks to the surprisingly strong growth in U.S. consumption. According to the Irvine-based California Avocado Commission, the state industry's marketing arm, total U.S. avocado sales will reach 440,000 tons this year, an 80% increase from the total consumed in 2000.
"Guacamole's gone mainstream," said John Loughridge, vice president of Coral Gables, Fla.-based Del Monte Fresh Produce Co., the fruit wholesaling giant that buys 90% of Perez's avocados and distributes them across the United States.
"The growth is due to avocados' favorable health aspects, the immigration trend and the popularity of Mexican cuisine," said Loughridge, who added that his company had come "from nowhere" to become the nation's second-largest avocado wholesaler partly because of its strong links to Michoacan producers.
Mexico has grabbed an increasing share of the expanding U.S. market. Benjamin Grayeb Ruiz, a Michoacan grower and current president of that state's growers and packers association, says Mexican exports will reach 100,000 tons this year, up from 42,632 in 2004. That would put Mexico on par with top-ranked Chile, which last year shipped 100,000 tons of avocados into the U.S. market.
Blanketed with avocado orchards, the rolling hills of western Michoacan state are alive with commerce. Uruapan, a city of 250,000, is the nerve center. Equipment firms, truck fleets, sanitary inspectors and orchard workers are all thriving in an industry that will pump about $400 million into the local economy this year, a 50% increase from five years ago. The number of packing plants has grown to 23 from 12 three years ago....
Out-of-work Mexicans are flocking to Michoacan from other states, lured by field wages that have grown 25% to 33% in two years.
"The market has been much better than we thought," Grayeb said. "But we invested a lot of time and money to make it happen."
Next up: Convincing the Chinese to eat avocados. Read the whole article.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 03, 2005 • Comments
He's Mr. Super-Resume. She's Ms. Bush Crony. But aside from good manners, John Roberts and Harriet Miers actually seem to have a lot in common. Each tends to be described as a "lawyer's lawyer," which means, as far as this non-lawyer can tell, someone who pays excruciating attention to the particulars of a case, without a big picture view of jurisprudence. In other words, not a Law Professor's Lawyer. As this Legal Times profile of Miers put it:
She has also earned a reputation as exacting, detail-oriented, and meticulous -- to a fault, her critics say.
"She can't separate the forest from the trees," says one former White House staffer.
But Miers' supporters say her emphasis on detail and procedure are exactly what the Office of the White House Counsel requires.
"She is very thorough and very hard-working and very conscientious and very careful, which is why she was a good choice for staff secretary and why she's a good choice as counsel," notes Brett Kavanaugh, a former White House associate counsel who replaced Miers as staff secretary in the summer of 2003....
Her critics say the problem goes beyond what Miers does or doesn't know about policy -- and right back to a near-obsession with detail and process.
"There's a stalemate there," says one person familiar with the chief of staff's office. "The process can't move forward because you have to get every conceivable piece of background before you can move onto the next level. People are talking about a focus on process that is so intense it gets in the way of substance."...
"In my view, she's a lawyer's lawyer [who] grasps facts very quickly, in terms of sizing up a situation," says James Francis, who was chairman of Bush's 1994 gubernatorial campaign and suggested that Miers become campaign counsel.
"She doesn't make careless mistakes and doesn't tolerate careless mistakes in others," adds Francis, who runs his own investment company.
Based on this rather limited sample, I'd say that if you want to be a Bush appointee to the Supreme Court, you've got to be someone other people call "smart," but absolutely, positively not an intellectual--not a systematizer, not a pattern finder, not a theorist, not someone who sees the forest, not, in other words, a person your critics could possibly call an "ideologue." With a nod toward human resources lingo, we can call it the Miers-Briggs Test: Only "S"'s need apply.
Link to National Law Journal via D Magazine's FrontBurner, which is covering the Dallas angle on Miers.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 03, 2005 • Comments