COLUMN LEFT / BRUCE SHAPIRO : Zoe Baird: a Fox in the Chicken Coop : The attorney-general nominee has no record of support for individual rights under the law.

There’s no doubt that Zoe Baird, Bill Clinton’s choice to be attorney general, is a gifted star of the legal profession. In a brief stint in the Carter Administration, she gave trenchant advice on constitutional questions ranging from the Iranian hostage crisis to the legal dangers of political patronage. In a meteoric rise through corporate boardrooms, she has earned a reputation as a brilliant negotiator and conciliator. Those skills could serve her well in salvaging the corrupted carcass of the Justice Department left by 12 years of Republican dismemberment.

But let neither Baird’s gender nor her impressive resume--from Warren Christopher’s O’Melveny & Myers to General Electric to Aetna--forestall some important questions.

Several of the early attorney-general prospects had proved civil-rights records; their careers showed an understanding of law and the Constitution as vehicles for social justice, a crucial part of the Justice Department’s mission. The same, unfortunately, can’t be said of Zoe Baird, whatever her private sympathies might be. In 15 years as a practicing attorney, Baird has never litigated a civil-rights case. Her closest brush with the rights of criminal defendants was her seeking (unsuccessfully) government reimbursement for Carter aide Hamilton Jordan’s legal fees when a special prosecutor looking into Jordan’s alleged drug use came up without even a roach clip. Baird boasts of her father’s trade-union background, but her one appearance before the Supreme Court was to argue, without success, that municipal transit workers should be exempt from federal minimum-wage standards.

Within the legal profession, Baird’s big cause has been billing reform. Though she resides in the nation’s fourth-poorest city (New Haven, Conn.) and works in the seventh-poorest (Hartford), cities in which busy corporate lawyers routinely devote their pro-bono time to community-service foundations and other fragile elements of the social safety net, Baird sits on just two boards of directors: the local phone company and a regional theater.

Baird’s work as a corporate lawyer has sometimes been directly at odds with the public interest. She joined GE when the company was extricating itself from the consequences of massive defense contracting fraud; with the cooperation of the Reagan Justice Department, she crafted a compliance program allowing the scandal-ridden company to police itself rather than be subject to public scrutiny. On behalf of GE, she lobbied (unsuccessfully) against legislation that encourages whistle-blowing to root out fraud in military contracts. At Aetna, Baird helped draft federal legislation (unsuccessful) to limit jury awards in product liability suits.

Its hard to imagine a greater arena of conflict between corporate motivation and public interest that the question of decent, affordable health care for all citizens. Considering Clinton’s waffling on how he intends to address this need, it should be troubling that he has chosen for his Cabinet’s inner circle someone who, while at Aetna, took personal responsibility for devising “a private-sector initiative that keeps the government from controlling health-care reform” (according to a 1991 Business Week report).

Given the broad responsibilities of the Department of Justice, from voting rights to the conduct of corporations to drug enforcement, the attorney general is, perhaps more than any other Cabinet officer, the guardian of the public interest. Both symbolically and practically, the attorney general sets the tone for public confidence in the law, whether by enforcing federal statutes, including civil-rights protections; or by keeping abuse-prone government agencies, including most especially the FBI, from crossing the line between law-enforcement and lawbreaking, or by ensuring the prosecution of corporate as well as individual criminals.

So the Senate needs to get some clear answers from Zoe Baird. Will she aggressively prosecute crime in the suites as well as the streets? What will she do immediately to reinvigorate the Justice Department’s moribund civil-rights division? And, when it comes to health-care reform, will Baird be the people’s lawyer or the insurance industry’s?