The nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to succeed Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court has brought up many questions in my mind concerning the qualifications one might look for in a justice.

The Constitution doesn’t outline any particular qualifications for potential justices, like holding a previous judgeship or having a law degree; however, I would suggest that precedent more than anything else defines the qualities one should look for in a competent justice.

The nominee has been touted by the White House and some conservatives in Congress as a legal and gender pioneer, someone much like the woman she would be succeeding. “Ms Miers is honest and hard-working and understands the importance of judicial restraint and the limited role of a judge to interpret the law,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said.

I disagree. The nominee appears to be lacking the proverbial weight we are accustomed to seeing in a Supreme Court nominee: This is where the question of merit figures into the equation. Miers’ previous experience includes being President Bush’s personal attorney in Texas and serving as general counsel of his gubernatorial campaign committee. Miers was also the first woman to head the Texas Bar Association. Before she became White House counsel last year, Miers served as White House deputy chief of staff and staff secretary.

Harriet Meirs is, for all intents and purposes, a symptom of the modern political spoils system. Indeed, her appointment has much more in common with the appointment of former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency Michael Brown than it does with any notion that she could compliment the court.

Justices in the past who did not have prior experience on the bench had other qualifications that merited their appointment to the highest court in the land. Earl Warren served as a district attorney and as the 30th governor of California before being appointed chief justice. William Rehnquist started his career as a law clerk for Justice Robert H. Jackson before later becoming assistant attorney general in the Nixon administration; he was nominated as an associate justice by President Nixon and later appointed chief justice by Ronald Reagan.

Meirs has no substantial experience to speak of on the national or state level that would merit her appointment to the Supreme Court. Could she even handle the rigorous intellectual demands of the court? Nothing in her previous experience would leave me to believe that she is up to the task.

Let us not forget that the woman Meirs would be succeeding, O’Connor, graduated near the top of her class from Stanford, was elected to the Arizona State Senate and was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals before earning a spot on the Supreme Court when Reagan nominated her.

Meirs has no experience outside of being a political, partisan appointee; she simply doesn’t merit the responsibility that accompanies her potential appointment to the highest court in the land.

Kyle Hardwick can be reached at [email protected]