Microsoft Appeals Judge to Step Down as Chief

Circuit Judge Harry T. Edwards, who excoriated the judge in Microsoft Corp.’s antitrust trial for talking to reporters about his decision to break up the software giant, will step aside as chief of a U.S. appeals court.

Edwards’ comments about U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson provided some of the most dramatic moments during two days of arguments on Microsoft’s appeal of the breakup before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Judges are not supposed to “run off our mouths in a pejorative way, because there is an appearance problem,” Edwards had said of Jackson.

Edwards, 60, will step aside in July as chief judge, the court said. He will remain on the court, succeeded as chief judge by Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, 55, whose nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 was scuttled by allegations he smoked marijuana while at Harvard Law School.