Governor Pataki’s appointment of Robert Smith to the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, is welcome news. Mr. Smith is the celebrated attorney who has been representing the governor against the bid by Mayor Bloomberg in the recent scuffle over bond refinancing. A top litigator who spent 34 years racking up a long list of legal wins at the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, his credentials are those of a lively conservative with an open mind who can be depended on to uphold the laws of the land without bending to politics or prejudice.

Though he spent some time of his career litigating against the death penalty, winning stays in cases before the Supreme Court, his position on the issue has migrated to a more moderate one. As he told The New York Sun in an interview in September, “Generally, I’ve become more conservative over the years. I started as a more or less liberal Democrat and found myself drifting to the right. My views on capital punishment were among the last to change.”

Mr. Smith has also shown a regard for the constitutional concept of property and free enterprise. He told the Sun that he is particularly proud of a 1985 case he won at the Court of Appeals that established, by a vote of 5-2, that shopping malls in New York are private property whose owners can ban pamphleteers and protesters without infringing on their constitutional right to free speech. He also exhibits a healthy respect for what might be called the idea of classical liberalism.”In practicing law and dealing with businessmen and government regulators, I began to appreciate in a practical way how much better things work out, usually, when government leaves businessmen alone,” he told the Sun in September.

Such sentiments, along with the strict construction of the New York state constitution’s debt provisions he laid out earlier this year, make Mr. Smith a brilliant nominee. Those of us who have received each holiday season his annual letter on the adventures of his family know, as well, that he can be a hilarious and elegant writer. He’s a man both President Bush and Senator Schumer could love. No wonder that even a liberal critic of Mr. Pataki’s past court appointments, Vincent Bonventre of Albany Law School, said of Mr. Smith: “If the Court of Appeals was filled with people of his apparent caliber, we’d have the strongest court in the country.”