The corporate law community often places high hopes in judges as a mechanism for checking government or (in Delaware) defendant excesses.  They usually go along, sure, but may in dicta indicate displeasure, or give critical speeches, and sometimes, as in the Newman insider trading case, the refusal to accept the Citigroup settlement, the ethics critiques made during the KPMG prosecutions, that displeasure will sprout into an adverse ruling.

It's a pretty interesting, but pretty gauzy, was of thinking about adjudication, maybe Orin Kerr would find it persuasive in the Fourth Amendment context, but in other areas of public law, administrative law, for example, the small community of bench and bar just don't see their roles that way.  It's not, "SEC you've gone too far this time, and so we're cooking up a new reason to reverse you," it's "SEC [or EPA, or whoever], we substantively disagree with this policy, and we're cooking up a procedural reason to reverse it."  Different, in that administrative law is not governed by equity, it is governed by process.

Anyway, my theory about the way white collar works in New York - opaque, clubby, but almost chivalrous - gets what I'm taking as a vote of confidence in James Stewart's nice overview of the fight between the judges and the US Attorney's Office in Manhattan over the pushy, PR-savvy nature of the US Attorney.  The whole column is well worth reading - for one thing, it sounds like a bunch of judges talked to Stewart, which never happens, and there's the requisite, "greatest judges ever! but" from the prosecutors office and "whatta prosecutor! however" from the judges.  But here's an excerpt that illustrates the way that this weird "just do justice" method of handling white collar crime works:

[Former statehouse speaker Sheldon] Silver’s lawyers moved to dismiss his indictment because Mr. Bharara had orchestrated a “media firestorm” that tainted their client’s right to a fair trial. Such motions are considered long shots, but Judge Valerie Caproni of Federal District Court in Manhattan wrote that Mr. Silver had a legitimate argument that the case should be thrown out because Mr. Bharara, “while castigating politicians in Albany for playing fast and loose with the ethical rules that govern their conduct, strayed so close to the edge of the rules governing his own conduct.”

Judge Caproni ultimately sided with the government, so there’s no way of knowing how close she came to tossing the indictment. But the possibility she even seriously considered such a step has set off alarms among some of her fellow judges. Judge Caproni herself acknowledged that dismissing an indictment is a “drastic remedy” that is “rarely used.” She also noted that the motion was not a disciplinary proceeding against Mr. Bharara. That didn’t stop her from spending a good part of the opinion questioning his ethics and chastising him for his public comments about the case.

This is, as they say, developing, and if you think that Bharara may be AG some day, one question is whether he will be able to avoid being blackballed by the bench ... and whether a blackballing would work outside of the white hankie world of white collar crime administration (didn't seem to work out so badly for Rudy Giuliani).

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