Legal News

GOP Legal Beagles Must Choose: the JD or the non-JD?

By Dan Slater

With Rudolph Giuliani jettisoned from the presidential race, and the leading Republican candidates whittled to two, a tough decision must be made by many within high-flying GOP legal circles: Mitt Romney or John McCain? For the Law Blog, the choice is a bit more cut and dried: the candidate trained as a lawyer or the candidate who’s not?

Despite Giuliani’s “liberal New York credentials,” reports the Legal Times, his campaign had lined up the support of a high-profile pack of GOP lawyers, such as Gibson Dunn & Crutcher’s Ted Olson and Miguel Estrada, and former solicitor-general-turned-Harvard-Law-School-professor Charles Fried. Giuliani, says the Legal Times, had raised $500,000 from lawyers at his four highest-donating firms: Gibson Dunn & Crutcher; Bracewell & Giuliani (where Giuliani is a partner); Weil, Gotshal & Manges; and Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Giuiliani’s departure left these lawyers scrambling for a candidate.

Olson has reportedly wasted no time in latching onto McCain, as has Northwestern Law professor and Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi, who backed McCain quite publicly in a WSJ op-ed yesterday.

But not everyone is sure where their loyality lies. “I’m in a quandary right now,” said Milbank’s Douglas Dunn, who, according to Federal Election Commission records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, donated more than $2,000 to Giuliani. There are pluses and minuses to both McCain and his chief rival for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, Dunn said, and there’s also “still plenty of time for all four candidates in both parties to make a fool of themselves.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 05, 2008 (boomark / email).