"It's not a bad thing to have somebody who might shake it up a little bit," Hatch, former Judiciary chairman, said after a 45-minute, closed-door meeting with Miers. "I think it's important for the court to have someone like her on it, someone who has dealt with real-people problems."

Miers has been criticized, most ardently by some conservatives, for lacking the qualifications to become a Supreme Court justice. She has been a lawyer, advising the president as White House counsel and before that as his private attorney. She has also headed the Texas lottery commission and was a Dallas city councilwoman, but has never been a judge.

Hatch said it is "absurd on its face" to argue a Supreme Court justice must have prior experience as a judge, noting that some of the most distinguished justices in the history of the court have not had prior judicial experience.

There is a long history of Supreme Court justices who had not previously been judges: William Rehnquist, Earl Warren, William Douglas, Felix Frankfurter and Louis Brandeis were among the 40 justices who had not previously served on the bench.

"These are all people who didn't have one ounce of judicial experience . . . yet rose to be great justices," Hatch said.

But Kermit Hall, president of the University of Albany and editor of the Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, said that "In each of those cases, they had a far higher level of distinction, either as academics or public officials or as advocates.

"Having judicial experience is a helpful, but not a necessary, qualification. It becomes important only when there aren't other kinds of experience that would prove similarly supportive of ambitions to be on the court," said Hall, who was president at Utah State University. "I think the question with Miers will be precisely that: whether her time as a private lawyer, her leadership of the Texas bar, her two years on the Dallas City Council, her conduct of the lottery in Texas, is sufficient to say this is a person of genuine talent, and while she doesn't have judicial experience she has other kind of public life or legal expertise."

Hatch's staunch defense of Miers despite her lack of judicial experience is reminiscent of the Republican senator's controversial, but ultimately successful, push for Ted Stewart's 1999 nomination to the U.S. District Court in Utah. Stewart, chief of staff to then-Gov. Mike Leavitt, a Republican, had never appeared in a courtroom as an advocate for a client and he had allowed his membership in the Utah State Bar to become inactive.

Hatch downplayed Stewart's lack of courtroom experience, saying his character was more important. "He's honest; he's decent; he's hardworking; he's fair," Hatch said at the time.

Miers lacks a paper trail of judicial opinions or academic work, and many of the legal opinions she has written would be subject to the attorney-client privilege. That means much of the information on Miers' views will be elicited through questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hatch said.