New York politics is mostly about striking caring poses. Liberals like former Mayors John Lindsay and Mr. Dinkins spoke endlessly of what the city owed the poor, but they delivered rising rates of crime and welfare. Mr. Giuliani spoke in the middle-class language of what the poor owe to the rest of society, and he delivered more peaceful neighborhoods and a rising standard of living from Mott Haven to East New York. For all of Fernando Ferrer's assertions that Mr. Giuliani abandoned "the other New York," the city's poorest neighborhoods experienced the sharpest drop in crime and biggest rise in income.

None of this was predestined. No other city has made comparable gains. Past booms in the 1960's and 1980's failed to revive the city's distressed neighborhoods. And very little of this would have happened had David Dinkins been reelected in 1993.

When Mr. Giuliani took office on Jan. 1, 1994, conventional wisdom had it that fear was the price people had to pay to be in New York. Not everyone agreed: In the closing years of the Dinkins administration, tourists stayed away in droves, while businesses and residents were racing for the exits in what seemed like an evacuation. Had Mr. Dinkins been reelected, the flight from fear would have become a flood.

In the early 1990's, when the city already had lost hundreds of thousands of jobs, union leader Dennis Rivera captured the spirit of the Dinkins years. He proposed tax increases on the grounds that "if the quality of life deteriorates any further, they [those who can] will leave anyway.

"What's going to happen to New York," he explained, "is a repeat of Detroit; those who can escape will." And there were plenty of reasons to escape. It seems like a memory from a distant time now, but recall that during the Dinkins years, a crowd in Washington Heights cheered when a heavy bucket hurled off a roof fatally struck a young housing cop working to clear double-parked cars so that fire engines could get through. Then there was the week of violence in Jamaica, Queens, when marauding "kids" smashed windows and looted displays in a shopping area once hailed as a haven for the black middle class.

You didn't have to see the Whitney Biennial, featuring a photo of five black males with the words "What You Lookn At" written across it in bold letters, or the first Batman movie, which depicted a Gotham held in thrall by an artist criminal, to worry that New York might be terminally ill. You just had to listen to city leaders like former union leader Victor Gotbaum, who denounced those who were "enamored of middle-class, two-parent families with children who don't have sex" because "middle-class values" were "contrary to the environment and lives of [New York's] students." New York's future was being written off.

The change under Mr. Giuliani-almost a rejoinder to Mr. Gotbaum's disdain for middle-class values-was best encapsulated by a large billboard along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It read in giant letters: "Citi: The Bank for the Upwardly Normal." Under Mr. Giuliani, the ideal that Mr. Gotbaum rejected-the ideal of upward mobility-once again became the defining credo of a city whose policies and politics had been based, before Mr. Giuliani entered office, on the assumption that the pathological was routine. A city once organized around the presumption that the poor were caught in a permanent depression, so that the best we could do was to make poverty comfortable, returned to the ideal of giving people a chance to make better lives for themselves. As Mr. Giuliani himself said, for many years "we blocked the genius of America for the poorest people in New York."

Breaking the Rules

"New York's mayors," explained Times columnist Joyce Purnick, "have always played by unwritten rules that demanded they get along with the leading players in government." Mr. Giuliani governed against the grain. He achieved greatness by repeatedly breaking those rules. Ed Koch had tried and failed to reform welfare and to merge the city's transit and housing police into the NYPD. Mr. Giuliani, impervious to the criticism from powerful interests, succeeded in both cases. "The usual yelling and screaming about this program, that program," he explained, wasn't going to stop him. He understood that in New York, the hospitals and schools and social services were often run more for the benefit of employees than the people they were supposedly serving. In case after case, he asserted the general interest of the city as a whole over the special interests accustomed to having their way.

His successes produced not only accolades, but also anger and envy from those whose power had been diminished. The result has been numerous efforts to denigrate his accomplishments. These usually take one of three forms.

The first assertion is that crime has fallen everywhere, so Mr. Giuliani had little to do with the decrease in crime in New York. This argument was made by Mr. Ferrer, WNYC radio host Leonard Lopate, New York 1 anchor Dominic Carter and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, among others. None of these critics supplied specifics-with good reason. Crime didn't fall everywhere, as anyone from Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit or a host of other big cities could have explained. In fact, much of the national decline in crime (anywhere from one-seventh to one-fourth) was a reflection of New York's achievements. And just as important, in some of the cities where crime had dropped, such as Los Angeles and Boston, it has, unlike in New York, been rising again the last few years.

A corollary of the above argument has it that Mr. Giuliani was just lucky. In the words of Mr. Ferrer, it was the national economy that saved New York, and "Alan Greenspan has been … one of the greatest crime fighters." Not true: Crime dropped by 30 percent in Mr. Giuliani's first two years-in other words, before the 1990's boom really took off. But even more important, the economic booms of the 1960's and 1980's were accompanied by rising rates of both crime and welfare. It was different this time.

Finally, the usually astute political consultant Hank Sheinkopf and a host of others have argued that nothing was accomplished in Mr. Giuliani's second term. A popular argument has it that the only thing Mr. Giuliani did since 1997 was to harass vendors and cabbies, censor art exhibits and defend rogue cops. This caricature ignores a long list of accomplishments that received only a fraction of the publicity of the Brooklyn Museum's Sensation exhibit, but has had a far greater impact on the life of the city. These include the Herman Badillo–led reform of City University, which reintroduced academic standards to an institution long on the slide; reform of the once violence-ridden Rikers Island jail under Michael Jacobson and Bernard Kerik; the success of the Nick Scopetta–led Administration for Children's Services; and Jason Turner's transformation of the welfare department from an agency that handed out checks to a place where people are pushed to find work. But the biggest accomplishment of the second four years, made possible by the continued drop in crime and welfare, has been the revival of numerous neighborhoods from Harlem to Bushwick. This is an accomplishment unmatched by any Mayor since Fiorello LaGuardia.

The shadow of Rudy Giuliani's accomplishments in reviving neighborhoods and reducing fear, welfare and the city tax burden will fall over every decision made by incoming Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Mr. Giuliani has raised the bar for what we expect of New York Mayors. Before Mr. Giuliani, the conventional wisdom insisted that New York was ungovernable. New York's problems were said to be an expression of national problems, social trends, right-wing Republicans or a variety of other bogeymen. We know better now, and we also know more about how government works, thanks to the light that Comstat has shed on New York policing. It will be harder for crime to creep up on us again, because New Yorkers can go online to get weekly crime statistics for their neighborhood precinct.

Above all, Mayor Giuliani should be remembered as the man who saved New York from self-destruction. He leaves office as "America's Mayor," a hero of 9/11 who is greeted with chants of "Rudy! Rudy!" wherever he goes.

But it was his response to the first crisis he faced eight years ago-when the city was careening toward disaster-that recreated the New York allure which other Americans responded to when terror struck in September.

In his final appearance as Mayor on Saturday Night Live on Dec. 15, Mr. Giuliani sang the Shirelles rock standard "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" The answer is yes-so long as New Yorkers remember how he restored the promise of American life for the city's poorest neighborhoods.

Unbeknown to almost all the Cravath and Sullivan lawyers who fuel this pretentious and ritual jousting, there's a genuine 138-year-old beef behind this–one with allegations of political wrongheadedness, overreacting and, of course, claims of superior understanding of the law.

In 1861, not long after the Civil War broke out, Algernon Sydney Sullivan was working solo out of an office on William Street. He took on an assignment representing the crew members of a Confederate warship called the Savannah who had been captured and sent to New York for trial on piracy. Sullivan argued that they were actually prisoners of war.

Not long before, William Seward had taken over as Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State. His bust today rests in Cravath's main reception area, as he was a name partner from 1823 to 1850. (Cravath's name wasn't added until 1901.)

The rest of Sullivan's tale is told in a 1979 Sullivan & Cromwell history that John Warden, a lawyer of the firm working on the Microsoft defense, was kind enough to read to N.Y. Law over the phone. "He was threatened, warned to leave New York, and denounced to the Federal Government, which went so far as to arrest and imprison him," Mr. Warden recited. Not noted in the account: William Seward, an ardent abolitionist offended by Sullivan's trafficking with Confederates, signed the imprisonment order himself.

Seward's act put Sullivan into custody at Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor for six weeks, until another lawyer convinced a judge that Seward had overestimated the Government's wartime power to suspend habeas corpus. (The judge concluded that the Government could only do that in Washington, D.C., not in the rest of the nation.) Sullivan returned to court, won a hung jury, and soon thereafter his clients were exchanged as prisoners of war for captured Union fighters. Sullivan moved on to other clients and other partners, eventually grooming William Nelson Cromwell to be his final name partner.

The case, however, drastically altered the founding father's career, according to Sullivan & Cromwell's senior counsel Robert MacCrate. "He was something of an outcast after that. He had been discussed as a candidate for Mayor before the war, but having represented the South, that went out the window," said Mr. MacCrate. The other burghers in town didn't invite him to join the founding of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. The experience left him terminally ill, too: He contracted disease in Fort Lafayette that he never shook.

A Cravath guy throws the firm's founder into jail simply for defending his client. Good feud material, no? "That connection seems to have escaped most people," said Mr. MacCrate.

But on his way to a meeting of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, Mr. MacCrate found himself in front of pictures of Cravath's founders in the hallway of the firm. With civil rights on his mind, he decided to bring up the incident. "Which one of these guys threw Mr. Sullivan in jail?" Mr. MacCrate said he asked. A Cravath partner had no idea what he was talking about.

John Warden, who said he was enjoying his hiatus from the Microsoft trial ("You bet"), downplayed any possibility that the Sullivan & Cromwell team would use Algernon Sullivan as inspiration for his current Cravath-tinged face-off or other modern-day cases. "Look, the firm didn't even exist then, much less have any kind of friendly rivalry with Cravath," he said. Maybe so, but Sullivan at least beat the Cravath guy in the courtroom then.

Rehnquist Joins N.Y.C. Bar, Denounces City Life Style

When Chief Justice William Rehnquist arrived at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York to become an honorary member the afternoon of April 13, he was wearing stripes. They were on his gray tie, though, as were four diamonds and a lot of dots. Nobody stood up when he entered the hall for lunch.

Speaking on the day after the nation's President was convicted of contempt in Federal court, before a crowd of 100, Mr. Rehnquist chose to discuss perjury. A car thief on the witness stand in Phoenix in the 1950's had lied to someone, and that helped Mr. Rehnquist get a "certainly guilty" client off. That was as close as he got to discussing the President's legal plight.

The Chief Justice did have a message to deliver to his new colleagues that afternoon, and it was that the city's law firm associates are entitled to a life, or at least some fresh air. "Surely some of the sense of being in control of one's own life is lacking in large law firms today. The demanding hours required leave little time for family or outside activities. The financial rewards are enticing, but some of the professional independence, some of the lawyer's role as an active citizen–things that seem to me, at any rate, to be part of the reason for being a lawyer–have been totally lost or greatly diluted in exchange for the financial rewards."

The audience of 100 gave him three standing ovations even though the picture he painted was in 1950's black-and-white and prominently featured illustrations from the Phoenix legal scene. "There was something of a community of lawyers revolving around the two courthouses which led to a feeling of congeniality and camaraderie among all but the most confirmed loners," he remembered fondly. "Most of us did not feel the breath of Mammon breathing down our neck every time we took a break."

Not here, he insinuated. He recited some lines from Longfellow's poem "The Building of the Ship": "The heights by great men reached and kept/ Were not achieved by sudden flight/ But they while their companions slept/ Were toiling upwards in the night."

Then he quoted a comment by Louis Auchincloss, the lawyer-author. "He had as an office a small cubicle which looked out only on a ventilation shaft. When he was asked whether he did a lot of his work at night, he responded, 'I don't know.'" He closed by saying the profession had changed but lawyers themselves were still the same admirable characters.

His former clerks–taking a noontime pause from their Mammon-fixated, soul-grinding jobs at Cahill Gordon & Reindel; Sullivan & Cromwell; Davis Polk & Wardwell; and the Federal District Court in Brooklyn, undoubtedly in exchange for work late into the night–greeted him afterward to say hello and to mention that they would be coming to the reunion in June.

New York lawyers shouldn't take the criticism personally, said Robert MacCrate of Sullivan & Cromwell, a former president of the New York State Bar Association. "He delivered the same speech in Indiana 20 years ago," recalled Mr. MacCrate.

Ted Kheel, Victor Gotbaum Negotiate Shelf Space

The book party on April 13 at the new New York Press Club conference center on 42nd Street celebrated labor lawyer Theodore Kheel's new book, The Keys to Conflict Resolution . In it, he describes techniques that will give one success in negotiations, and intersperses throughout reminiscences of some of the big-time negotiations in which he's participated.

On hand to congratulate Mr. Kheel, 85, were veteran New Yorkers like newscasters Gabe Pressman and Ralph Penza, and former labor leader Victor Gotbaum. Mr. Gotbaum, 77 years old, was also keeping an eye on book-party etiquette. His new book comes out next month. In it, he describes how to win in negotiations, and includes reminiscences from the major battles in which he has participated.

Despite the similarity, neither man viewed the other as competition. "Ted doesn't fashion himself as a negotiator, I didn't fashion myself as a third-party mediator," said Mr. Gotbaum. The two of them never worked together, so picky readers get to shop between two different sets of bargaining sessions. Mr. Gotbaum's include his divorce talks.

Mr. Kheel's book, his third, was published by the small press Four Walls Eight Windows, and he took payment for it. He is donating royalties to a not-for-profit foundation he started to promote conflict resolution, and is advertising the book by including the entire text on the Internet.

Mr. Gotbaum, in contrast, was given a $75,000 advance by Simon & Schuster. Not bad for a first-time author. Must be a pretty good negotiator, huh? "No, they just offered me $75,000 as an advance. I never negotiated it. I didn't ask for $80,000 or push them up. They just offered the advance and that was it."

Mr. Gotbaum, who negotiated several multimillion-dollar contracts for city workers during his heyday, suggests in his book that one size up one's adversary across the table. He did that with Simon & Schuster. "I was a little flattered, why the hell are they advancing that kind of money? Then I realized it's only an advance, you make it up. I really don't even know how it works, to tell you the truth. I'm assuming it goes towards profits or something like that." Maybe author Mr. Kheel will explain it to him.

You can reach N.Y. Law by e-mail at mfleischer@observer.com.