Mukasey seen as his own man

Interviews with several dozen people, including former prosecutors and judges, as well as attorneys who appeared before Mukasey when he was a judge and have worked beside him as a lawyer, present a picture of a thoughtful person who never shoots from the hip and who is not above recognizing his mistakes and correcting them. Not all lawyers agree with him, but they all seem to agree that he gives them a fair shake.

"This guy is not a lefty, he's not a progressive, he's not a liberal," said Stanley Cohen, who has defended alleged terrorists in New York and is concerned about the "love fest" that has arisen over the announcement of Mukasey's appointment, particularly among some liberal Democrats. But "he does express some independent thought," Cohen said.

As an example, Cohen recalled a case he had before the judge in the 1990s. The defendant was a man who refused to testify before a federal grand jury about why his name showed up as cosigner to a checkbook belonging to the political director of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group identified by the United States and others as a terrorist organization. The refusal meant that Mukasey could hold the man in jail for 18 months or until the end of the grand jury's term, in the hopes that that would persuade him to talk.

But, Cohen said, "after three or four months he let him out. He applied the law strictly and found there was a zero chance that this guy sitting in jail would change his mind."

Jeffrey G. Smith, a New York securities lawyer, tried to have the judge taken off a case that he filed in the mid-1990s against Philip Morris Cos. The suit alleged that the company had defrauded investors by hiding evidence that it had manipulated nicotine levels in cigarettes in order to hook smokers.

He asked for the recusal after Mukasey revealed that as a young lawyer in the 1960s, he had done work defending tobacco companies against suits by smokers with lung cancer. "He denied my motion, saying [his prior work] was so long ago that it would not affect his judgment," Smith said. "Boy, was I glad he did."

With Mukasey overseeing the class-action suit, Smith eventually won a more than $100-million settlement from the tobacco company for investors.

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Path to the bench

A native New Yorker, Mukasey graduated from Columbia University and Yale Law School, where he made law review and earned a reputation as a deft editor of student writings on patent law and other obscure points of law.