Private Practice and Miers

This was posted on the Corner. It gives more detail on the private practice experience I noted in a post below:

I did a quick review of the bios of the current Justices. If you leave out the departing O’Connor, the only Justice with any significant private practice experience left on the Court is Kennedy, at about 14 years. Souter and Scalia had a handful of years right out of law school; believe me when I tell you that doesn’t count. Thomas had a couple of years in-house at Monsanto between government positions. Roberts had 10 years at Hogan & Hartson, but as I understand it, it was exclusively appellate work, which only barely counts.

J. Harvie Wilkinson (my Con Law professor years ago) has no private practice experience. Michael Luttig had about 4 years.

Miers, by contrast, has over 25 years as a commercial litigator. Though I’ve seen some of the derisive comments about the intellectual rigor of that branch of the profession as compared to the supposedly more rarified field of Constitutional Law, that is nonsense. A good commercial litigator’s practice is, in fact, one of the most intellectually challenging careers in the profession. Every case, every business you represent, and every deal is different. You have to explain unfamiliar and complex commercial issues (which are found in both “large” and “small” cases) to judges and juries.

If you confine appointments to Constitutional scholars, you’re going to have nothing but academics and government lawyers, which is what you’ve basically got there now.
My point is that if Miers is a good lawyer, the fact that she hasn’t had an opportunity to deal with search and seizure issues in her career is not isqualifying. In fact, her familiarity with many of the regulatory, tax and other commercial issues faced by the Court will be much greater than her colleagues. And maybe we’ll have fewer of those ridiculous 7-part tests to deal with.

The poster above left out Michael McConnel who also has no private practice experience. Here is the table I posted previously:

Justice / Years in Private Practice

Rehnquist/ 16
Roberts/ 12
Kennedy/ 12
Scalia /6
Thomas/ 2
O Conner/ 2
Souter/ 0
Ginsburg/ 0
Breyer/ 0
Stevens/ 0