President Bush has chosen Harriet Miers, White House counsel and a loyal member of the president's inner circle, to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, a senior administration official said Monday.

If confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, Miers, 60, would join Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the second woman on the nation's highest court.

Miers, who has never been a judge, was the first woman to serve as president of the Texas State Bar and the Dallas Bar Association. The Southern Methodist University law graduate also formerly served on the Dallas City Council.

Without a judicial record, it's difficult to know whether Miers would dramatically move the court to the right. She would fill the shoes of O'Connor, a swing voter on the court for years who has cast deciding votes on some affirmative action, abortion and death penalty cases.

On Nov. 20, 2004, Elisabth Bumiller of The Times profiled Ms. Miers:

The woman President Bush appointed this week as White House counsel, Harriet Miers, is hardly known in Washington but has a history in Texas of handling years of scandal at the state's lottery commission. The president, who once retained her as his personal lawyer, described her in 1996 as ''a pit bull in Size 6 shoes.''

Those attributes should help her in a new job that requires her to advise Mr. Bush not only on national security and military law -- a large part of the counsel's responsibilities since Sept. 11, 2001 -- but also on continuing legal investigations, including an inquiry into who in the administration leaked the name of a C.I.A. undercover officer.

''She's the kind of person you want in your corner when all the chips are being played,'' said one friend, Joseph M. Allbaugh, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. ''She will give the president advice unvarnished, and that's exactly what he wants.''

Ms. Miers, 59, currently serves as deputy chief of staff for policy and assistant to the president. She has rarely, if ever, talked to reporters since arriving in Washington in 2001, and she declined a request for an interview on Friday.

But her history, and comments from friends, suggest that she is the kind of woman, like Karen P. Hughes and Condoleezza Rice, whom Mr. Bush likes on his staff: tough, direct and intensely loyal. Her appointment reflects the president's determination to promote longtime members of his inner circle to critical positions for his second term.

''Harriet Miers is a trusted adviser on whom I have relied for straightforward advice,'' Mr. Bush said in a statement released this week. ''Harriet has the keen judgment and discerning intellect necessary to be an outstanding counsel.'' In 1995, Mr. Bush, then in his first months as governor of Texas, appointed Ms. Miers to a six-year term as chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission. Ms. Miers unexpectedly resigned after five years that were marked by controversy and the dismissal of two executive directors of the commission. The first executive director, Nora Linares, was fired in 1997 when it became public that her boyfriend had worked for the company that held the contract to operate the lottery. Ms. Linares's successor was dismissed after only five months when he began reviewing campaign contributions of state legislators without the commission's knowledge. Despite the problems, as well as the lottery's declining sales, The Dallas Morning News praised Ms. Miers when she resigned in 2000 for ''preserving the operations' integrity.'' Ms. Miers, who is unmarried, was born and raised in Dallas, one of five children whose father was in the real estate business. She graduated from Southern Methodist University and its law school, then went to work in Dallas for Locke Purnell Rain Harrell. In 1985 she became the first woman to be president of the Dallas Bar Association, and in 1992 the first woman to be president of the Texas State Bar. She became the president of Locke Purnell in 1996, the first woman to lead a major Texas law firm. In 1998, she presided over the merger of Locke Purnell with another big Texas firm, Liddell, Sapp, Zivley, Hill & LaBoon, and became co-managing partner of the resulting megafirm, Locke Liddell & Sapp.

In 2001, Mr. Bush brought Ms. Miers to Washington with him as his staff secretary, a little known but powerful job in which she handled much of the paper flow to the president. Ms. Miers is a regular guest at Camp David and is often the only woman who accompanies Mr. Bush and male staff members in long brush-cutting and cedar-clearing sessions at the president's ranch.

Ms. Miers has an extremely low profile in Washington. She was better known in Texas, where Governor Bush introduced her when she received the Anti-Defamation League's Jurisprudence Award in 1996.

''When it comes to cross-examination,'' Mr. Bush said then, ''she can fillet better than Mrs. Paul.''