Harriet Ellan Miers (; born August 10, 1945) is an American lawyer who served as White House counsel to President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007.
A member of the Republican Party since 1988, she previously served as White House staff secretary from 2001 to 2003 and White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy from 2003 until 2005. In 2005, Bush nominated Miers to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, replacing the retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. In the face of bipartisan opposition and questions about her fitness for the court, Miers asked Bush to withdraw her nomination a little over three weeks after it was announced. In 2007, Miers returned to private practice, becoming a partner in the litigation and public policy group at Locke Lord.
Miers was born in Dallas and spent most of her life there until she moved to Washington, D.C. in 2001 to work in the Bush administration. She has called herself a "Texan through and through". She is the fourth of the five children of real estate investor Harris Wood Miers Sr., and his wife, the former Erma (Sally) Grace Richardson. Miers graduated from Hillcrest High School in Dallas in 1963.
Miers entered Southern Methodist University intending to become a teacher. The economic plight of her family was so dire that she almost dropped out in her freshman year, but she found part-time work to put her through college. Then her father had a debilitating stroke. When a lawyer helped organize her family's financial situation, Miers was inspired to enter law school. In 1967, Miers graduated from Southern Methodist University with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. In 1970, she graduated from its Dedman School of Law with a Juris Doctor degree.
In the summer of 1969, between her second and third years of law school, Miers worked as a clerk for Belli, Ashe, Ellison, Choulos & Lieff, the San Francisco law firm founded by Melvin Belli. Miers was immersed in tort law. Her supervisor was Robert Lieff, then a partner in the Belli firm and later a founder of the nationally prominent plaintiffs' law firm Lieff Cabraser. In a 2005 interview, Lieff said Miers "saw what we did for people who needed to get a lawyer and were only able to get a lawyer by a contingent fee."
After graduating from law school, from 1970 to 1972 Miers was a law clerk for the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Joe Ewing Estes. She was admitted to the State Bar of Texas in 1970 and to the DC bar in 1997.
In the late 1990s, while Miers was on the advisory board for Southern Methodist University's law school, she helped create and fund a women's studies lecture series named after pioneering Texas lawyer Louise B. Raggio. Raggio, who died in 2011, knew Miers for nearly 40 years, since Miers was a student at SMU. Miers was one class behind Raggio's son at SMU, and Raggio became a mentor to Miers; years later she served as a close advisor to Miers during the Texas Bar race. "I was interested in having a woman president", Raggio said. "She was an electable woman, a woman with a big firm behind her. Women's groups supported her because they wanted to show that a woman would be a competent president."
From 1972 until 2001 Miers worked for the Dallas law firm of Locke, Liddell & Sapp (and predecessor firms before mergers). She was the first female lawyer the firm hired and later became its president. When the merger that created Locke, Liddell & Sapp took place in 1999, she became the co-managing partner of a legal business with more than 400 lawyers. In 2000 the firm settled a lawsuit for $22 million that accused the firm of having "aided a client in defrauding investors". According to the Class Action Reporter, Miers "said the firm denies liability in connection with its representation of Erxleben. 'Obviously, we evaluated that this was the right time to settle and to resolve this matter and that it was in the best interest of the firm to do so,' Miers said."
As a commercial litigator, Miers represented clients including Microsoft and the Walt Disney Company.
In 1985, Miers became the first female president of the Dallas Bar Association. In 1992, she became the first woman to head the State Bar of Texas. From 1989 to 1998, she headed the board of editors for the American Bar Association Journal. From 2000 to 2001, Miers chaired the ABA's Commission on Multi-Jurisdictional Practice.
In 1989, Miers formally registered with the Republican Party and was elected to a two-year term as an at-large member of the Dallas City Council. She did not run for reelection in 1991 after a restructure of the city council converted Miers's at-large seat into a single-district seat.
Miers met George W. Bush in January 1989 at an annual Austin dinner for legislators and other important people. Nathan Hecht, a mutual friend and Miers's date, made the introduction. Miers worked as general counsel for Bush's transition team in 1994, when he was first elected governor of Texas. She then became Bush's personal lawyer and worked as a lawyer in his 2000 presidential campaign.
While head of the State Bar of Texas, Miers joined an unsuccessful effort to have the ABA maintain its then-official position of neutrality on abortion. The ABA had adopted abortion neutrality at its 1990 annual meeting in Chicago after strong opposition by the State Bar of Texas to a pro-choice position. By the summer of 1992, at its annual meeting in San Francisco, the issue was again pending before the ABA assembly. Miers, who had not been involved in the Chicago meeting, supported ABA abortion neutrality in San Francisco. At the San Francisco meeting, the ABA Assembly and House of Delegates voted to take a pro-choice position, and the state bar of Texas dropped its plans to ask the ABA's policy-making body to hold a referendum of the group's 370,000 members on the issue.
Since September 1994 (about the same time she began to work for Bush), Miers has contributed to the campaigns of various Republicans, including Kay Bailey Hutchison, Phil Gramm, and Pete Sessions, with recorded contributions to Republican candidates and causes totaling nearly $12,000. She supported Democrats in the 1980s, with recorded contributions to the Democratic National Committee, Lloyd Bentsen's Senate campaign, and Al Gore's 1988 presidential campaign totaling $3,000. Her last recorded contribution to a Democratic cause or campaign was in 1988. Ed Gillespie said she was a "conservative Democrat" at the time.
In April 2007, Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell announced that Miers was returning to the firm. In her new role at the firm, Miers registered with the United States Department of Justice as an agent for the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Embassy of Pakistan.
In 1995, George W. Bush, then Texas governor, appointed Miers to chair the Texas Lottery Commission. Some have credited Miers with reforming the commission after a previous corruption scandal.
Her tenure has also been criticized. In 1997, the commission hired Lawrence Littwin as executive director but fired him five months later. At the time, the contract to operate the lottery was held by the politically connected GTECH Corporation, which had obtained the contract with the help of former Lieutenant Governor of Texas Ben Barnes). Littwin, as director, began an investigation into whether GTECH had made illegal campaign contributions and whether it owed the commission millions of dollars for breaches of its contract. He said Miers ordered him to stop the investigation, and brought a lawsuit alleging that he was fired in retaliation for the investigation and to ensure that GTECH would keep its contract.
According to Texans for Public Justice, GTECH paid Littwin $300,000 to settle the suit.