July 16 (Bloomberg) -- Judge Sonia Sotomayor struck a pro- business chord in U.S. Senate testimony on her Supreme Court nomination.

“In business, the predictability of law may be the most necessary,” Sotomayor said yesterday, pointing to her eight years representing companies in private practice. The Senate Judiciary Committee resumed the hearing this morning, concluding a final round of questioning of Sotomayor before it hears from other witnesses.

Business lawyers said Sotomayor’s comments signaled an appreciation of the practical needs of companies, bolstering her 17-year record as a trial and appellate judge. She often has been receptive to business arguments, as when she voted in 2006 to block class-action status for a suit that accused banks of rigging initial public offerings.

Her testimony was “music to my ears,” said Roy Englert, a Washington appellate lawyer who has represented the U.S. Chamber of Commerce before the Supreme Court. “Businesses are very adaptable to law changes, but what they have a hard time with is uncertainty and unpredictability in the law.”

The high court in recent years decided a number of top business cases by a single vote, including fights over shareholder rights, antitrust law, product-liability suits and punitive damages. President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor, 55, to succeed Justice David Souter, who served as a swing vote on business issues before retiring this year.

Familiar Ground

Republicans returned to familiar ground in questioning Sotomayor today. Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona questioned her assertion that she was bound by precedent when she sided with a Connecticut city that canceled planned promotions because no blacks scored high enough on tests to qualify.

Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, asked whether “personal judgment” would play a role when the high court decides whether the Second Amendment, which protects gun rights, applies to the states as well as the federal government.

“You hire judges for their judgment, not their personal view or their sense of what the outcome should be,” Sotomayor responded.

Graham said he thought Sotomayor would be able to “embrace a right that you may not want for yourself” and wasn’t an “activist” who would try to impose her personal views on the country.

Business Record

As for her record on business cases, Sotomayor hasn’t always sided with companies. In 2001, she joined a 2-1 decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York conferring class-action status on an antitrust suit by merchants against the nation’s largest credit-card companies.

Sotomayor has twice upheld punitive damage awards by rejecting arguments they were so large as to be unconstitutional. She was part of a three-judge panel that in 2007 upheld a $1 billion award to mobile-phone maker Motorola Inc. of Schaumburg, Illinois, in a corporate fraud suit against Turkey’s Uzan family.

As a federal trial judge in 1999, Sotomayor upheld a $1.25 million punitive award to the victim of on-the-job sex discrimination and retaliation.

At the same time, she voted with business in other cases, including a 2004 ruling throwing out a European Community lawsuit accusing the tobacco industry of cigarette smuggling. She dissented in 2000 when the 2nd Circuit allowed damage claims by victims of the 1996 crash of TWA flight 800 off the Long Island shore.

Antitrust Stance

“She calls them the way she sees them, based on the law, on business issues,” said Theodore Boutrous of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles. Boutrous’s firm represented defendant Bear Stearns Cos. in the IPO case.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce hasn’t yet taken a position on the Sotomayor nomination. The trade group endorsed former President George W. Bush’s two nominees, John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

In her testimony this week, Sotomayor questioned a lawyer’s characterization of her as having a pro-business record on antitrust questions.

“I can’t speak for why someone else would view my record as suggesting a pro or anti approach to any series of cases,” she said. “All of the businesses cases, as with all of the cases, my structure of approaching is the same: What is the law requiring?”

Financial Markets

She sidestepped a question about whether Congress can regulate financial markets, saying the issue would likely come before her on the high court.

“You’re just raised the very first question that will come up when Congress passes an act,” Sotomayor said.

Sotomayor had suggested that legal uncertainty was a virtue in a 1996 article in the Suffolk University Law Review. She wrote that “an unpredictable system of justice is one that serves a productive, civilized but always evolving, society.”

Her comments yesterday took a different tack, as she discussed how she learned about the needs of companies in her eight years at Pavia & Harcourt in New York. Her clients included units of Ferrari SpA, the sports car maker based in Modena, Italy; Rome-based jeweler Bulgari SpA, and Paris-based luxury-goods maker LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA.

Drafting agreements between companies “made me very respectful about the importance of predictability in terms of courts’ interpretation of business terms,” she said. “That was very, very critical to organizing business relationships in our country.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net; William McQuillen in Washington at bmcquillen@bloomberg.net;

Last Updated: July 16, 2009 10:28 EDT