Harriet Ellan Miers (born August 10, 1945) is an American lawyer and former White House Counsel. In 2005, she was nominated by President George W. Bush to be an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, but opposition from both sides of the political spectrum led President Bush to withdraw the nomination at Miers' request.
Early life and education
Miers was born in Dallas, Texas, and spent most of her life there until she moved to Washington, D.C. (2001) to work in the Bush administration. She describes herself as a "Texan through and through." She is the fourth of the five children of real estate investor Harris Wood Miers, Sr., and his wife, the former Erma (Sally) Grace Richardson.
Miers entered Southern Methodist University intending to become a teacher. The economic plight of her family was so dire that she almost dropped out in her freshman year, but she was able to find part-time work that put her through college. Then her father had a debilitating stroke. When a lawyer helped organize her family's financial situation, Miers was inspired to enter law school. Miers graduated from Southern Methodist University with a bachelor's degree in mathematics (1967) and from its Law School with a Juris Doctor degree (1970).
Career
In the summer of 1969, between her second and third years of law school, Miers worked as a clerk for Belli, Ashe, Ellison, Choulos & Lieff, the San Francisco law firm founded by Melvin Belli. Miers was immersed in tort law. Her supervisor was Robert Lieff, then a partner in the Belli firm and later a founder of the nationally prominent plaintiffs' law firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP. In a 2005 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Lieff stated that Miers "saw what we did for people who needed to get a lawyer and were only able to get a lawyer by a contingent fee." .
After graduating from law school, from 1970 to 1972, Miers was a law clerk for the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Joe E. Estes. She was admitted to the Texas bar in 1970 and admitted to the DC bar in 1997.
In 1979, after she made partner in her law firm, she became an evangelical Christian after having had a series of long discussions with Nathan Hecht, her close friend and colleague at the firm.
In the late 1990s, while Miers was on the advisory board for Southern Methodist University's law school, she helped create and fund a Women's Studies lecture series named after pioneering Texas lawyer, Louise B. Raggio, who was a mentor to Miers"Raggio, now 83, has known Miers for nearly 40 years, since Miers was a student at Southern Methodist University. Miers was one class behind Raggio's son at SMU, and Raggio became a mentor for Miers; years later she served as a close advisor to Miers during the Texas Bar race. 'I was interested in having a woman president,' Raggio says. 'She was an electable woman, a woman with a big firm behind her. Women's groups supported her because they wanted to show that a woman would be a competent president.'.
From 1972 until 2001, Miers worked for the Dallas law firm of Locke, Liddell & Sapp (and predecessor firms prior to mergers). She was the first female lawyer hired by the firm and later became its president. When the merger that created Locke, Liddell & Sapp took place in 1999, she became the co-managing partner of a legal business with more than 400 lawyers. In 2000 the firm settled a lawsuit which accused the firm of having "aided a client in defrauding investors" for $22 million; according to the Class Action Reporter, Miers "said the firm denies liability in connection with its representation of Erxleben. 'Obviously, we evaluated that this was the right time to settle and to resolve this matter and that it was in the best interest of the firm to do so,' Miers said."
As a commercial litigator, she represented clients including Microsoft and the Walt Disney Company.
In 1986, Miers became the first female president of the Dallas Bar Association. In 1992, Miers became the first woman to head the State Bar of Texas. She has also served as chair of the Board of Editors for the American Bar Association Journal and as the chair of the ABA's "Commission on Multi-Jurisdictional Practice".
In 1989, Miers was elected to a two-year term as an at-large member of the Dallas City Council. She did not run for reelection in 1991 after a restructure of the city council converted Miers' at-large seat, elected by voters citywide, into a single-district seat.
Miers met George W. Bush in January 1989 at an Austin dinner, an annual affair held for legislators and other important people. Nathan Hecht, a mutual friend and Miers' date, made the introduction. Miers subsequently worked as general counsel for Bush's transition team in 1994, when he was first elected Governor of Texas. She subsequently became Bush's personal lawyer and worked as a lawyer in his 2000 presidential campaign.
While head of the State Bar of Texas, Miers joined an unsuccessful effort to have the American Bar Association maintain its then-official position of neutrality on abortion. The ABA had adopted abortion neutrality at its 1990 annual meeting in Chicago. By the summer of 1994, at its annual meeting in San Francisco, the issue was again pending before the ABA assembly. Miers, who had not been involved in the Chicago meeting, supported ABA abortion neutrality in San Francisco on two grounds. First, the State Bar of Texas was statutorily prohibited from taking positions on political issues. Second, Texas had made bar membership an attorney licensure requirement, thus forcing all Texas attorneys to support financially the ABA's position, regardless of their personal convictions. ABA neutrality on abortion was defeated at the San Francisco meeting. The association has remained supportive of the pro-choice position ever since.
Since September 1994, Miers has contributed to the campaigns of various Republicans (at about the same time she began to work for George W. Bush), including Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Phil Gramm, and Pete Sessions, with recorded contributions to Republican candidates and causes totaling nearly $12,000. Her earlier political history shows support for the Democrats during the 1980s, with recorded contributions to Democratic candidates and causes, including the Democratic National Committee, the Senate campaign of Lloyd Bentsen and the 1988 presidential campaign of Al Gore, totaling $3,000. Her last recorded contribution to a Democratic cause or campaign was in 1988. Ed Gillespie said that she was a "conservative Democrat" at the time.
In April 2007, Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell announced that Miers was returning to the firm. In her new role at the firm, Miers has registered with the United States Department of State as an agent for the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Embassy of Pakistan.
Personal life
Miers's mother and three brothers live in Dallas. She also had a sister, Kitty, who is deceased. Miers has not married and has no children.
She is a close friend of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman. Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht has known her for more than 25 years. After Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court, Hecht was cited as an unofficial spokesperson representing her views.
Government service
Prior to assuming the position of White House Counsel, Miers had served as White House staff secretary, and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy. Before joining the Bush administration, Miers was a lawyer in private practice for 27 years, handling business cases and acting as then-Governor Bush's personal lawyer. She served as the first female president of both the Dallas Bar Association and later the State Bar of Texas and also served one term on the Dallas City Council.
In 1995, George W. Bush, then Texas governor, appointed Miers to chair the Texas Lottery Commission. Some have credited Miers with reforming the commission after a previous corruption scandal.
Her tenure has also been criticized, however. In 1997, the commission under Miers hired Lawrence Littwin as executive director but then fired him five months later. At the time, the contract to operate the lottery was held by the politically connected GTech Corporation, which had obtained the contract with the help of a former Lieutenant Governor of Texas (Democrat Ben Barnes). Littwin, as director, began an investigation into whether GTech had made illegal campaign contributions and whether GTech owed the commission millions of dollars for breaches of its contract. He stated that Miers ordered him to stop the investigation. He brought a lawsuit alleging that he was fired in retaliation for the investigation and to ensure that GTech would keep its contract. According to Texans for Public Justice, GTech paid Littwin $300,000 to settle the suit.
Miers resigned from the lottery commission in early 2000, a year before her term ended. She said her resignation had nothing to do with lagging sales in the system's biggest game, Lotto Texas, but rather that she wanted to allow her successor time to prepare for rebidding the lottery's primary operator contract.
There was some speculation during Bush's 2000 campaign that Bush would appoint Miers to the position of Attorney General. This was seen as possible with her trusted role as Bush's personal attorney and her many appointments during his tenure as governor. This also recalled William French Smith who was Ronald Reagan's personal attorney before being named Attorney General. Miers was not chosen and John Ashcroft bec
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