Anyone who wants to put one over on Judge Amy St. Eve should be prepared to get up pretty early in the morning: sometime before the 5 a.m. alarm signals the beginning of her highly regimented day. By 6:15, it's probably too late -- she's already at work in her chambers. And once the day's proceedings start(precisely at 9, if not a few minutes before), there won't be any time. Things move at a famously brisk clip in the 41-year-old's Chicago courtroom. The five-foot-tall, Diet Coke-addicted "fistful of dynamite" doesn't welcome windy submissions and circuitous legal arguments. There's a daily run along Lake Michigan to be slotted into the schedule. And this judge expects to be home in the suburbs by 5 p.m., cooking dinner for her radiologist husband and three young children.

"My advice to anybody appearing before Amy is: always be prepared. Know your case. Do your homework," says Judge Charles Kocoras, a colleague on northern Illinois's U.S. District Court. "And don't lose your cool." Judge St. Eve is a stickler for courtroom decorum -- she has already cautioned both sides in the Conrad Black case to stop their backbiting and tone down the "over the top" pleadings. But it is her quick mind(along with her fanatical punctuality)that most prosecutors and defence attorneys have come to respect. "She listens to arguments, knows when she's heard enough, then decides and doesn't look back," says Kocoras, until recently the circuit's chief judge. "And that's what you need in this business."

Indeed, self-doubt doesn't appear to be one of St. Eve's problems. If she has ever failed at anything in her life it's not apparent. Growing up in downstate Belleville, Ill., just outside St. Louis(St. Eve is an inveterate Cardinals fan), the dentist's daughter made the cheerleading squad, headed up the student council and was named class valedictorian. At Cornell, she finished her undergraduate history degree with "academic distinction in all subjects." She spent one summer studying at Oxford, and another interning on Capitol Hill. At Cornell Law School she edited the Law Review and made the Order of the Coif, a national society for the top 10 per cent of law students.

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.)

Despite all the recent publicity, Judge St. Eve remains something of a closed book. Her Whitewater past has led to some speculation she has a conservative bias, and there have been rumblings that she is "pro-prosecution."(Her father once told a newspaper that she never wanted to be a defence attorney "because you have to lie too much.")But finding a theme in her rulings is difficult. Whatever strategy Conrad Black chooses to employ, this much is clear: he better be on time.

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