De gustibus cerevesiae non scit lex

I'm deeply skeptical of attempts by reporters like the NYT's Adam Liptak to draw broad conclusions about how a nominee for a cabinet post might perform based on the nominee's rulings in a handful of cases he's presided over as a judge. I'm even more skeptical of attempts to compare one such judge's stats against other judges' stats — as if it's meaningful that, in a single particular year,

in criminal cases, he was reversed 20 percent of the time, compared with an overall reversal rate from his court of roughly 15 percent in 2006. But in civil cases, his 24 percent reversal rate compared favorably with the overall rate of roughly 30 percent.

Nonetheless, Liptak's attempt to apply these analytic techniques to Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey is entertaining, including for the bastardized Latin quote above, a holding that the law does not trouble itself to write about the taste of competing brands of beer. And I'm untroubled by the prospect that the future Attorney General may be "fiercely intelligent, prickly, impatient, practical and suspicious of abstractions." The less polite formulation may be "kicks butt and takes names." For an AG-nominee, that counts as good press. The more I read, the more eager I am to hear from Judge Mukasey at his confirmation hearings. I'm ready to get some cerevesiae chilled down, and I might pop popcorn.