PROFILE : Judge Sporkin Called Smart, Pragmatic, Tough

U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin, whose Microsoft edict this week stunned the corporate world, is a man of steel nerves who has never retreated from clashes with powerful interests.

A pug-faced Yale University graduate, Sporkin, 63, has an intolerance for superfluous chatter, a reputation for a pragmatic legal approach in his rulings and a loyal following among the nation’s top securities attorneys.

“He cuts through a lot of the bull that people throw around,” said Harvey Pitt, a former Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement chief. “He is very, very smart and has both feet planted firmly on the ground.”

In a decision that left both sides reeling, Sporkin told Microsoft attorneys this week that they lacked credibility and senior Justice Department attorneys that they lacked competence when he threw out an antitrust accord the two sides had reached.

Sporkin then suggested that the two parties consider various alternative provisions in a settlement of charges that Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive marketing practices--an assertive stance that left the department’s antitrust chief, Anne Bingaman, fuming.

But it was just another example of how Sporkin likes to mix it up with attorneys in his courtroom--and how he never shies away from taking on large corporations or even the federal government. Indeed, critics say he is too willing to press the limits of his authority and too eager to be in the middle of high-profile cases. Even so, few question his integrity.

Attorneys unfamiliar with Sporkin have assumed in the past that his habit of leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes is a sign that he is snoozing at the bench.

In fact, it is Sporkin’s method of focusing his mind--though he once leaned back so far that his chair toppled over and he landed on his back. An amused associate gave Sporkin a helmet for future protection.

“He is very smart, very creative, very independent and a man of the highest integrity,” said Howard Schiffman, a Washington securities attorney who worked under Sporkin at the SEC during the 1970s. “If Stanley thinks he is correct, in whatever he is doing, he will do it.”

Schiffman recalled one day when he entered a tire store and found Sporkin arguing with a salesman over a defective tire on his daughter’s car. “When he saw me, he yelled, ‘Howard, tell him who I am, tell him the one thing I don’t do is lie!’ ” Schiffman said.

Sporkin keeps in close contact with securities attorneys, having a brown bag lunch in his office every few months with former friends from the SEC, said Michael Barrett, a private attorney and former staff director for investigations at the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “He will take on anybody,” Barrett said.

In his spare time, Sporkin takes on a chess computer, sometimes winning. He keeps fit on a treadmill and is said to disdain suggestions that he is an advocate for the underdog, preferring to be known as an objective pragmatist.

Sporkin’s mentor was the late William Casey, who was an SEC commissioner and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Sporkin reportedly saved Casey from an embarrassing blunder at the SEC and was befriended by Casey afterward.

Casey brought Sporkin to the CIA as general counsel, when business interests wanted the Reagan Administration to get rid of Sporkin, then the SEC’s enforcement chief.

Sporkin is credited with being a dominant force in shaping the nation’s security regulations. Under him, the number of consent decrees doubled from an average of 70 per year to more than 140.

It was Sporkin who seized on the civil consent decree, rather than criminal charges, as the perfect weapon in battling corporate fraud. He saw that the decrees would ease the burden of proof for the government and weaken the legal defenses of targets by taking away their right to use the Fifth Amendment.

The irony is that his detailed knowledge of consent decrees should have made him the ideal judge to hear the Microsoft case, but Sporkin is also known as an independent thinker who would be unwilling to sign off on an accord in which he did not believe.

The fact that Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, is among the most esteemed and wealthy industrialists in the world would not phase Sporkin a bit, his admirers say.

“The fact that he may be dealing with the wealthiest man in the world isn’t a consideration for him,” Pitt said. “He would not give him less justice or more justice than anybody else.”

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Staff writer Robert Jackson contributed to this report.