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Representative Michele Bachmann played hostess Monday to Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court in the first of what she said would be several “constitutional seminars” for members of the House.

Monday’s seminar, which Ms. Bachmann’s office said was attended by 30 to 35 House members, including at 4 Democrats, focused on the separation of powers. The session was closed to the media, but afterward some members described Justice Scalia’s remarks as probing and funny, and said he told them to “pay attention to the Constitution.”

The Obama administration’s health care law did not come up in Mr. Scalia’s remarks or during the question-and-answer session, Ms. Bachmann said. Instead, she said, the session focused on other issues, like whether earmarks would be considered constitutional, though she declined to provide Mr. Scalia’s thoughts on the matter.

Ms. Bachmann declined to comment on other matters, like her flirtation with a 2012 run at the White House, or the fact that she is giving a response to President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, in addition to the official Republican response planned by Representative Paul Ryan. “It’s not a competition,” she said, as she headed off down the hall.

Ms. Bachmann said she would be inviting other members of the court to speak to members
of Congress, as well as law professors and other constitutional scholars.
“We will be extending an invitation to any of the justices who would like to speak with us,” she said. “We’d be honored to have any of them come that are there, and whether they are liberal or conservative we leave it for your judgment to determine.”

She added later, “The Constitution is not a partisan document.”

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President Obama on Wednesday nominated Virginia A. Seitz, a law firm partner who specializes in appellate litigation to lead the Justice Department’s powerful Office of Legal Counsel.

The nomination represents Mr. Obama’s second attempt to get someone confirmed to lead the agency, which tells the executive branch whether proposed policies would be lawful. His last nominee, Dawn Johnsen, a former Clinton administration lawyer, withdrew after her nomination had lingered for more than a year without a Senate vote.

In a statement, Mr. Obama described a group of executive branch nominees that included Ms. Seitz — whose nomination to the position of assistant attorney general for the office has been rumored for months — in glowing terms.

“The extraordinary dedication these men and women bring to their new roles will greatly serve the American people, he said. “I am grateful they have agreed to serve in this administration and I look forward to working with them in the months and years to come.”

Ms. Seitz is currently a partner at the law firm of Sidley Austin. Her work there has included being the counsel of record for a group of retired military officers who filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of upholding affirmative action policies in a 2003 Supreme Court case, Grutter v. Bollinger.

She does not have a great deal of experience in national security legal policy matters – a factor that could both hurt and help her. Critics may attack her lack of relevant experience, since the Office of Legal Counsel has been deeply involved in setting limits – or sometimes secretly proclaiming a lack thereof – on what the executive branch wants to do to combat Al Qaeda.

On the other hand, critics are unlikely to find much of a paper trail laying out specific views on such matters as Bush administration interrogation policies and the balance between handling terrorists as wartime combatants or as criminals. Such issues have served as recurrent fodder for partisan controversy.

The Office of Legal Counsel wields extraordinary power. If a proposed policy would be illegal, it has the responsibility of telling the president that it cannot be done. But if it signs off on a policy, then any official who takes an action based on its opinion is essentially safe from prosecution – even if the legal analysis invoked by the office is later repudiated.

Once obscure, the Office of Legal Counsel became notorious during the administration of President George W. Bush after its political appointees, citing expansive theories of executive power, issued secret memorandums approving surveillance and interrogation policies that bypassed statutory and treaty limits.

The controversy that surrounded the office after those memorandums came to light have made it difficult for presidents of both parties to get anyone confirmed to lead it. It has not had a Senate-confirmed assistant attorney general since 2004.

Ms. Seitz earned an undergraduate degree from Duke University, was a Rhodes Scholar, and graduated first in her class from Buffalo Law School. She also clerked for Harry T. Edwards, a former appeals court judge, and William J. Brennan, a former associate justice of the Supreme Court.

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After a decade as the inspector general of the Justice Department, Glenn A. Fine told President Obama and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Monday that he will step down early next year.

In letters to Mr. Obama and Mr. Holder, Mr. Fine said “it is time for me to pursue new professional challenges” and he would resign at the end of January 2011.

“I am proud” of his office’s “significant contributions to the Department of Justice,” Mr. Fine wrote. “Through our audits, investigations, inspections, and special reviews, we have sought to improve the department’s performance, promote economy and efficiency in its programs, and detect and deter waste, fraud, and abuse in its operations.”

Mr. Fine had already served about five years in lower positions in the office of the inspector general when President Bill Clinton appointed him to become its top official in 2000. He went on to become among the most prominent watchdogs in the federal government.

His office attracted particularly widespread attention during its investigations into Justice Department scandals during the Bush administration — including documenting politicized hiring practices in the department’s Civil Rights Division and the circumstances behind the firing of nine United States attorneys in 2006.

Mr. Fine’s office also audited the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation over its use of expanded surveillance powers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – including bringing to light widespread problems with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s use of administrative subpoenas called “national security letters.”

In a statement, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, commended Mr. Fine for his “excellent work” in helping to ensure that the Justice Department operated “efficiently, effectively, within the scope of the law, and with integrity and commitment to American values.”

“I particularly applaud his work to shed light on improper political influence in hiring and prosecutions, which helped bring the department through a particularly dark chapter in its history,” Mr. Leahy said, adding that “all Americans should appreciate Inspector General Fine’s audits of the use of surveillance authorities” – investigations that “led to greater public accountability and triggered important reforms by the F.B.I.”

Attorney General Holder also praised Mr. Fine.

“For more than fifteen years, Glenn Fine’s commitment to integrity and professionalism has helped the Department of Justice fulfill its most important responsibilities,” Mr. Holder said in a statement. “Throughout his decade-long tenure as inspector general, he has embodied the Justice Department’s highest ideals and greatest traditions of service.”

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Turns out Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the high court’s senior conservative light, loves his digital gadgets. The 74-year-old Scalia told a recent meeting of the Federalist Society that he downloads his own music into an iPod — mostly classical and opera — and studies legal briefs on his own iPad, the Washington Post reported. [...]

After nine months as the Justice Department’s “senior counselor for access to justice,” Laurence H. Tribe, a prominent Harvard law professor and mentor to President Obama, will leave his position and return to Massachusetts early next month.

The department has begun sending out invitations to a farewell reception for Mr. Tribe on Dec. 3, his last day in the position. In a phone interview, Mr. Tribe, 69, confirmed that he is leaving and cited medical reasons: he has been having a recurrence of facial seizures and other symptoms associated with a benign brain tumor, which was diagnosed in 2008.

He said he decided several months ago to leave at the end of the year because he wants to be closer to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he is receiving treatment. He says he still intends to resume teaching at Harvard Law School in the fall term of 2011, when his two-year leave of absence will be complete.

Mr. Tribe said he was speaking openly about his medical situation “to avoid anyone speculating” that his departure had anything to do with the leak last month of a letter he had written to President Obama in May 2009. It spoke disparagingly of Sonia Sotomayor, then an appeals court judge, as a potential Supreme Court nominee.

The professor, who taught the future President Obama during his time as a law student, had originally hoped to be given a wide-ranging position in the Obama administration dealing with “rule of law” legal policy issues. Instead, he was offered a narrower mandate of leading the Justice Department’s “access to justice” initiative, and joined the government in March.

“I think it’s been extremely productive,” Mr. Tribe said of his time as a government official, adding that while “It’s been as difficult as I imagined it would be to get a lot done in an environment with limited funding,” on the whole “given that it’s been only nine months I feel very good about what we’ve accomplished.”

During Mr. Tribe’s brief tenure, he traveled around the country meeting with judges, prosecutors, public defenders, and legal aid workers, in an effort to find places where access to the justice system could be improved for ordinary people. He said he was pleased with the ways his office had found “to create a much more energized network, even though the problems are pervasive and cannot be transformed overnight.”

In partnership with other agencies, Mr. Tribe’s office pushed programs to increase training and collect more data about indigent defense, use the Internet to expand legal services to poor people in rural areas, strengthen legal services for victims of domestic violence, and expand mediation as an alternative to lawsuits for people involved in foreclosures.

Still, Mr. Tribe said he was frustrated by the inability to do much that required legislation, given the difficulty in moving anything through Congress, but learned to live with that limitation and to focus on pragmatic things that could be done with existing budgets and legal authorities.
As an example of what he portrayed as a “trivial” yet memorable improvement, he said that at his suggestion, a courthouse in Los Angeles changed a sign that said “unrepresented pro se litigants” to the plain-English “people without lawyers.”

But if pragmatic considerations were no obstacle, he said he would urge society to devote more resources to indigent defense and similar programs because “without delivering meaningful access to justice to more people, we’re really going to underperform as a society and not live up to our commitments.”

Mr. Tribe is scheduled to speak at the White House on Friday at a “Middle Class Task Force Event” with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The Justice Department said the access to justice initiative, which includes half a dozen lawyers, would continue. It was not clear when a successor to Mr. Tribe might be appointed.

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The comforting, even noble tale of John C. Keeney is a story too often left untold in official Washington. It is the story of a man who rarely tooted his own horn, who did his job, who minded his own business, who selflessly filled in when others failed, and who enjoyed what he calls today [...]