WWW- President Bush has nominated White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Miers, 60, has no judicial experience. A longtime Bush loyalist, she was the first woman president of the Texas State Bar and of the Dallas Bar Association, where in 1996 she became president of Locke, Purnell, Rain & Harrell. She became co-manager of the firm after a merger created Locke Liddell & Sapp.

Bush hired Miers in the early 1990s to search his own background for anything opponents might use against him when he first ran for governor of Texas. She later introduced Bush to Alberto Gonzales, who is now U.S. attorney general. During Bush’s first term as governor, Gonzales used information provided by Miers to persuade a judge to excuse Bush from jury duty, which would have required him to reveal his 1976 arrested for drunken driving, The Associated Press reports. That arrest did not become public knowledge until the tail end of the 2000 campaign.