From the '07 article...
The Black case won't even rate as the biggest media circus of her still-young career. In 1994, after four years of working for a big New York firm, St. Eve joined Ken Starr's Whitewater investigation, working as an associate independent counsel in Little Rock, Ark. Although she left the office in mid-1996 -- before Whitewater became more about cigars and blue dresses than corruption -- St. Eve did help secure fraud convictions against three of Bill Clinton's friends: Jim Guy Tucker, and Jim and Susan McDougal. Starr, now the dean of Pepperdine University Law School in Malibu, Calif., declined a request for an interview. But in 2003, he told the Chicago Tribune Magazine that St. Eve was a "superb lawyer, wise beyond her years" who would "lead and guide lawyers more senior than herself, including yours truly." More importantly, said the former prosecutor, "the jury in Little Rock adored her, and they trusted her."(Starr should know. In 1999, St. Eve returned to Little Rock to testify for him after Susan McDougal alleged that his office had pressured her to tell lies about Bill and Hillary Clinton. The jury didn't buy McDougal's story.)
After Whitewater, St. Eve took a job in Chicago as an assistant U.S. attorney, spending more than four years prosecuting everything from murders to state government scandals. "She's very smart, highly organized and very prolific," says Scott Lassar, then her boss, now a partner at a prominent Chicago firm. "She was a superstar."
Others share that opinion. In the spring of 2001, St. Eve left the U.S. attorney's office to take a high-profile gig as a corporate litigator for pharma giant Abbott Laboratories. Less than a year later, at the tender age of 36, she was appointed to the federal bench. Peter G. Fitzgerald, the U.S. senator who picked both St. Eve and Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the Black case, for their jobs, recalls that her application just "leapt out" from the pile.(Black's prosecutor became U.S. attorney six months after St. Eve's departure from the office.)In a formal job interview at the dining room table of his Chicago home, St. Eve was even more impressive, says Fitzgerald, who returned to private life in 2005. "She knocked the ball out of the park. Very articulate, very quick, very impressive." At her confirmation hearing in April 2002, St. Eve sent an even clearer message that she was a gamer -- carting along her then six-week-old son, Brett, to Capitol Hill. She sailed through with the blessings of both parties.
Just five years on, there is already speculation that Judge St. Eve may be on track to bigger and better things -- a seat on the Court of Appeals, or perhaps, someday, the U.S. Supreme Court. She has become a familiar figure in the national press, presiding over a number of high-profile cases. In 2005, she ruled in favour of a "Hooter's Girl" who claimed sexual harassment by managers and co-workers who commented on her breasts and asked her out, upholding a jury's $250,000 damages award. There's the ongoing saga of Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a pizza mogul and Democratic fundraiser who is facing charges of soliciting kickbacks and campaign donations from companies bidding on state contracts. There were also the cases of Mohammed Salah and Abdel-Haleem Ashqar, two Palestinian activists facing charges of funnelling money to Hamas. Judge St. Eve raised the ire of Muslim groups when she admitted an allegedly coerced confession, which Saleh gave while in Israeli custody in 1993, into evidence. The pair were recently acquitted of terrorism and racketeering charges, but found guilty of obstruction.(It's hard to say if it's a good omen for Conrad Black, but Fitzgerald was the prosecutor on that file, too.)
http://www.macleans.ca/homepage/magazine/article.jsp?content=20070312_103134_103134
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