The latest bombshell from state Supreme Court Justice Charles E. Ramos arrived last week by email. It landed around midday, lighting up the Blackberries and laptops of lawyers with news of an unexpected decision in the case of Richard A. Grasso’s paycheck.   

Jolted by an electronic buzz in his pocket, an attorney for Grasso, the former New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) chairman, interrupted lunch to find the opinion on the court’s website. Across town, at the offices of his adversary, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, the boss was not around. (He is running for governor, after all.) But his deputy, Avi Schick, was working at his desk when the tantalizing missive arrived. Schick started scanning the 73-page opinion.
    

From a tangle of claims, motions, and appeals, Judge Ramos had plucked one of the case’s central issues — whether Grasso had fully informed the NYSE board about his $187.5 million pay package. Without a trial, Ramos decided that the former executive had failed to do so. It took Schick a while to realize that “we got what we were asking for. And that was a pretty darned good moment.”
    

Though Grasso said he will appeal, the decision means that he might have to return tens of millions of dollars in retirement benefits, close to what the attorney general’s office sought when it sued Grasso two years ago for being overpaid as the head of a not-for-profit organization. But in the minds of some lawyers, the ruling stands out as a bold, if not arrogant, act of judicial discretion.
    

“It’s pretty extraordinary,” said New York litigator Christopher Clark, “when you realize that there are some very important facts that are hotly disputed [in the case], and the judge decided that they did not need to be decided.”
    

Widely viewed as one of the smartest trial judges in New York, Ramos has gained a reputation for impatience and startling independence. He has overruled the decisions of arbitrators, denounced the conflicting interests of investment banks, and defended the rights of consumers — even when the law seemed against him. And he has an apparent aversion to big paychecks. Not counting the Grasso suit, Ramos has ruled in favor of challenges to the salaries of executives or the fees of lawyers in at least a half-dozen cases during the past decade, most notably the national tobacco lawsuit that settled for $206 billion four years ago.
    

Given Ramos’s record, the turn of events in the Grasso case is not that surprising. A weekend race car driver, the judge is famously unpredictable.
   

“He’s a very bright guy,” said New York lawyer Steven Weiss, who has known Ramos since law school, “and I’m often surprised at how often he takes a position totally contrary to the one I would have thought.”

   
This time, it’s one lawyer requesting a temporary restraining order. Instead of postponing the hearing until the other side can appear, Ramos activates the speaker phone on the bench and dials opposing counsel. A woman asks to take a message. Ramos, head in hands, sighs loudly. “I don’t have all day to deal with this.” She then puts him on hold to the music of the Temptations, and he sighs again, wiggling in his chair to the beat. A lawyer comes on the line and assures the judge that he will be right over. Ramos hangs up, and then yells to several dark-suited men in the audience. “Are we going to try this case today?” Hearing a yes, he thumps his fist on the bench. “Great! We’re going to actually earn our pay today!”
    

It is vintage Ramos: Impatient, probing, and cajoling, willing to take the time to understand an issue but eager to move on. He is often funny, though not all lawyers appreciate his style. “If you don’t know what you are doing,” says New York litigator Jeffrey Eilender, “he can be a difficult guy. But I work to get cases in front of him. It’s like practicing before a federal judge.”
    

Ramos seems efficient, an impression that statistics support. His backlog is slight, with cases hanging around his court an average of 10.8 months last year, compared with an 18.7-month average for the Supreme Court’s Manhattan Civil Term. He disposed of 1.6 cases per day last year, on average, less than the entire court’s 2.1 average, but he’s a whiz at motions: a daily average of 4.3 compared with the court’s 2.9. He totaled more than 1,300 dispositions and motions in 2005.
    

Off the bench, Ramos is decidedly less revealing. “He’s very private,” said one lawyer who has appeared before Ramos several times and worked with him on a court committee. “He won’t talk a lot about his background.” The judge declined an interview for this piece, saying in a brief conversation that “presenting detailed information is not helpful to the administration of justice. . . .  In my case, what you see is what you get.”
    

Here are the outlines: He grew up in Riverdale, graduated from New York University in 1964, and three years later earned his law degree from Fordham Law School, where he was an “average” student, said Weiss, his friend and classmate. His passion was cars. Ramos and Weiss spent weekends at each other’s home, taking apart and reassembling cars until all hours. The intricacy of the engines appealed to Ramos’s intellect, said Weiss, and racing to his competitive nature. Even today, Ramos races his car at Lime Rock Park, a professional track near his weekend house in Cornwall, Connecticut, an exclusive community of multi-million dollar homes.
    

From Fordham, Ramos joined the law office of Benedict Ginsberg. The firm handled mostly commercial lawsuits, representing real estate companies and financial clients such as Prudential Bache Securities. After briefly running the firm in the early 1980s, Ramos was appointed by a mayoral committee to the New York Civil Court, where he served for 10 years.

As a Civil Court judge and, from 1988 through 1993, an acting Supreme Court justice, Ramos joined several other judges in publicly criticizing the screening panels that chose Democratic candidates for Manhattan judgeships, claiming they trumped law with politics. In 1992, having just lost a run for the Supreme Court, he again criticized the selection process in a letter to the New York Law Journal, accusing “those who have accumulated and hold on to political power” of ignoring Hispanic candidates for the bench. He was elected to the court in 1994.  
    

In 1990 he handled the first of several free speech cases. At issue was a challenge to the X-rating given “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” — an offbeat Spanish film directed by Pedro Almodovar. Ramos upheld the rating, deciding that he could not impose his own rating without violating the First Amendment rights of the Motion Picture Association of America, but also acknowledging that “the rating system censors serious films by the force of economic pressure.”
   

In a 1996 case, Ramos refused to order a man who practiced law over the Kenny Rogers Roasters restaurant at Broadway and 71st Street to remove from his window a “Bad Food” sign. “First Amendment rights must not be compromised,” ruled Ramos, “merely because the plaintiff (restaurant) may suffer some loss of profit.”
   

In 1997, he dismissed the case of a woman who had accused New York Daily News columnist Mike McAlary of libeling her by suggesting that her rape story was made up. The story turned out to be true, but McAlary had reported the doubts of police, and Ramos said journalists should not be liable when they fairly and accurately report official information. The judge also accused the U.S. Supreme Court of undermining free speech by allowing such suits for defamation: “The freedom of the press is either absolute or limited,” he wrote. “History and good sense dictate that it be absolute.” The parties eventually settled.
    

Ramos seemed to temper his views on free speech and other issues when consumers’ rights were at stake.
In 2004, for example, he ordered Brown & Williamson to stop its advertising campaign for Kool cigarettes, because the ads were aimed at children. He was also lenient in approving several consumer class actions: In 1998, for example, he certified a national class of cable and satellite TV subscribers who complained when a heavyweight fight they were viewing was cut short because Mike Tyson had bitten off Evander Holyfield’s ear. (Ramos dismissed the suit at a later stage.) And in a 2001 case of first impression in New York, the judge decided that a defunct pharmacy had violated its duty of confidentiality to customers by selling their prescription records to a drugstore chain. (The case eventually settled.) One of the lawyers involved claimed that, despite the absence of precedent, Ramos ruled against the pharmacy because “he thought it was a very wrong thing to have occurred. It was like, you just can’t do this kind of thing.”
    

Other lawyers confirm that he has strong views on how cases should come out. “He sees the law as bendable,” said the lawyer who worked with Ramos on a court committee. “Justice is an important commodity to him.” This inclination seems a product of Ramos’s confidence in his own intelligence. “He’s just not afraid,” said Eilender, citing the judge’s brash criticism of the U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in libel law. That lack of fear allows him to be unusually creative, say other lawyers, a clear asset when it comes to settling cases.
    

One indication that Ramos might not be much of a settlement judge is the percentage of trials that reached a verdict last year in his courtroom: 65 percent, compared with an average of 49 percent for all Manhattan Civil Term courts. But New York real estate litigator Jack Lester calls Ramos a “top judge” in settling cases, mentioning the judge’s handling of a case involving a landlord who claimed that Baruch College’s plans for a dormitory violated zoning laws. Ramos “got off the bench, rolled up his sleeves, and got into the nitty gritty,” said Lester, “appointing an independent architect to help modify the project to everyone’s satisfaction.”
    

A downside of Ramos’s intellectual confidence might be his oft-reported lack of preparation for oral arguments. “While he might be generally familiar with the type of case, he will not have read the papers,” said one lawyer who asked not to be named. “So you don’t know what’s on the man’s mind.” Even those who respect him highly say it is difficult to know how he will come out in a case. “There’s a lot of thinking out loud with him,” said Eilender. “You’ll see it in the seesaw of oral argument. He’ll seem to be going one way, and then he will go the other.”
    

This approach can lead to unusual decisions — and a healthy, if better than average, rate of reversals on appeal. From 2000 through 2005, 267 of the judge’s rulings were appealed. Higher courts affirmed 182 and reversed 85, a rate of 31.8 percent that ranks him the 22nd least reversed among the 62 Civil Term judges with at least 10 appeals before the First Department. But sometimes it seems that Ramos almost dares to be overturned. Consider the tobacco case.

In 1998, 46 states reached a $206 billion settlement with tobacco companies over the public health costs from cigarette smoking. New York’s share was some $25 billion. Three years later, an arbitration panel awarded fees to the outside lawyers who had helped the states pursue the cases. The six law firms that had assisted New York were to receive $625 million — about $13,000 an hour. In 2002, the arbitrators’ award was submitted to Ramos. But instead of confirming the award, Ramos challenged it, a move opposed by the lawyers, the tobacco companies, and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer’s office argued that challenging the fees might jeopardize the entire settlement, but Ramos would not budge.
    

The New York Appellate Division ruled unanimously that Ramos lacked the authority to review the fees, and critics attributed the whole controversy to Ramos’s desire for higher judicial office. Harvey Weitz, one of the lawyers involved with the case, refused to comment, saying only, “He’s a very ambitious man.” But other lawyers contend that Ramos merely tried to do the right thing. “I think he felt that what he was doing was a principled, ethical thing to do, and there was overreaching by the lawyers, and he didn’t like that,” said New York litigator David Rosenberg.
    

Whatever Ramos’s motives, his decision squared with his other rulings. In 1997, for example, he presided over New York Attorney General Dennis C. Vacco’s suit accusing Adelphi University trustees of wasting assets by paying university president Peter Diamandopoulos more than $800,000 a year. The parties settled, but Ramos denied the trustees’ request to recover their legal fees and Diamandopolous’s request to receive deferred payments under his contract. During the next two years, Ramos rejected as excessive legal fees in two securities class actions, one involving Bell Atlantic NYNEX Mobile’s customer renewal policies, the other Sara Lee Corp.’s acquisition of Chock full o’ Nuts. And earlier this year, Ramos refused to dismiss a suit challenging the $160 million that Viacom Inc. had paid its top three executives in 2004, when the company lost almost $17.5 billion.
    

None of this guarantees that Spitzer will win his lawsuit against Grasso, but Ramos already handed the former stock exchange chief several defeats before the most recent one. Among other things, the judge denied Grasso’s request to dismiss four of Spitzer’s six claims, and seized for himself the task of deciding whether Grasso’s pay was reasonable, leaving lesser issues for a later jury trial.
    

In any event, with his consistent rulings against Grasso and knack for eye-catching decisions, Ramos seems to have accomplished what he ostensibly wanted to avoid: raising his public profile to the level of Spitzer’s and Grasso’s. “I’m a great believer that it’s about the people involved in the case,” he said in a brief interview, “not about the judge.”