I think I need to correct a misimpression about my views of Harriet Miers’s qualifications.

A friend recently told me that I have said some “mean” things about Miers on this blog. I asked him for examples, and he couldn’t provide specifics. I reminded him that I have already expressed my agreement with Pejman Yousefzadeh:

Harriet Miers is an excellent litigator and the kind of person that a law firm would turn to in order to be managed. No one doubts that she is intelligent and accomplished. But saying that does not mean that we can also say that she is Supreme Court material. Too many people conflate the two.

When I read this passage to my friend, he said that he remembered these comments, but that they have gotten lost in the shuffle.

I don’t want to have to keep repeating this, but let me say it once here: Miers’s resume in many ways similar to my own. Where it is different, it is generally because she has had more impressive work experiences than I have.

So unless I am saying I am a dummy, how could I claim that her resume says that she is?

Let’s take the school first. Miers and I both went to Texas law schools. She went to SMU, I went to UT-Austin. While UT is without a doubt a more prestigious school, neither one is Harvard or Yale.

Regular readers know that I am not a school snob. I have consistently disagreed with the notion that a person’s school tells you much about their intelligence. While complete dummies don’t generally make it into Harvard Law, plenty of Harvard grads lack the common sense God gave a chimp. Conversely, the top students at lower-rated schools are consistently every bit as bright as those at top schools. I have always said this.

What’s more, some students attend relatively less prestigious schools for entirely personal reasons, and Beldar has pointed to evidence that Miers did just that.

I haven’t heard that Miers was one of the two or three very top students in law school; neither was I. I have read that she graduated in the top 10 percent of her class; so did I.

Miers was an articles editor for her law review. I was a notes editor for mine. To the extent that there is any difference, an articles editor position carries more prestige.

Miers clerked for a federal district judge. So did I. I think a clerkship for a trial judge is one of the greatest experiences a lawyer can have. I sent out some resumes to circuit judges, but concentrated primarily on the District Court. I was particularly lucky to work for someone who used to be the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, as well as an AUSA. After a trial, he would sit with us in chambers and tell us what he liked and didn’t like about the attorneys’ performance: what jurors they should have dismissed, what arguments they should have made, and so forth. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.

After I graduated, I went to work for large New York law firm, and later worked for the D.A.’s office, where I am now. I have done over forty trials. But I have never run a law firm, or been the president of a bar association, or been a White House counsel.

Here’s the thing, folks. While I think there’s a decent chance that I could have gotten a clerkship with a Court of Appeals judge somewhere in the country, if I had considered that a high priority, there is about zero chance that I would have qualified to be even a mere clerk with the Supreme Court. And with all due respect to myself, I don’t belong on the Supreme Court, and I never will.

So if my pal happened to become President of the United States, and nominated me for the Supreme Court, I would reluctantly have to call that nomination second-rate. (Nominating me would also be an act of political suicide, given my forthright opinions expressed on this blog every day.) I would agree with anyone who called my resume relatively undistinguished — for the position of Supreme Court Justice.

I think I could easily make a perfectly fine federal district judge. I’ve done the work and done it well. (On all the cases I worked on, my judge was reversed only once — and that was because he had declined to follow my advice.) With sufficient experience, I could even some day make a decent Circuit Court of Appeals judge. (Again: that could never happen anyway, thanks to the blog.)

But I’m just not one of the top nine conservative legal intellects in the nation. I never will be. And I don’t belong on the Supreme Court.

And, from what I know, neither does Harriet Miers.

I want more than an intelligent and capable lawyer for this position. I want someone with the twin attributes of 1) stellar qualifications and 2) an unswerving and demonstrated commitment to judicial conservatism. As I have already argued, these two are connected, because authoring persuasive opinions from a judicially conservative perspective is not easy stuff. It demands candidates who are at the top of their game. And I have no reason to believe Harriet Miers is such a candidate.

But don’t tell me that I am being elitist or calling her a dummy, because I’m not.