THE Department of Justice (DOJ) is a many-tentacled thing, in charge of activities from the Drug Enforcement Administration’s coca-spraying in Latin America to the prosecution of Medicare fraudsters, via oversight of the FBI, immigration courts and everyone’s voting rights. Perhaps as a result of this complexity, attorneys-general, who run the department, tend to be remembered for one or two things. For John Ashcroft, who held the post during George W. Bush’s presidency, it was covering up the breasts of a statue in the Great Hall and signing off on the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques. One way to make sense of Eric Holder, who said on September 25th that he was leaving after more than five years in the job, is to think about the conflict between rights and liberties.

Begin with civil liberties, where Mr Holder’s record seems least coherent. On his watch the DOJ ceased to enforce Bill Clinton’s Defence of Marriage Act, which defined that intermittently blissful state as something only for heterosexuals. For civil libertarians, that was a great victory. Yet Mr Holder’s department also pursued officials who leaked information and journalists who published it with more vehemence than under any other recent president, secretly collecting phone records from the Associated Press, threatening a New York Times reporter with prison and making free use of the Espionage Act, a measure invented to trap German agents in the first world war.

According to a simplified model of American politics, those to the left of centre tend to think more in terms of rights, while those on the right think in terms of liberty from government interference. Seen through this prism, Mr Holder is less puzzling. He has been quick to pursue violations of civil rights, including gay rights, where he has spotted them, but reluctant to defend civil liberties. Though the constitution protects press freedom, there is no mention of a right to leak classified information: hence the pitiless prosecutions of those who have done so.

This divide also helps to explain Mr Holder’s eagerness to charge companies, rather than individual employees, under criminal law. This strategy, which Mr Holder outlined in a memo in 1999, has annoyed both those who think his department should have put some bank bosses behind bars and those who think it has criminalised doing business. Criminal charges, wrote Mr Holder, can make government “a force for positive change of corporate culture”. Someone more worried about government interference would no doubt see that as a job properly left to investors.

On the overuse of prison as a punishment, right and left have met. Mr Holder came to view the incarceration of so many black men as a civil-rights problem. Republicans have made most of the running on reducing prison populations, partly because Democrats have long feared accusations of being soft on crime. Mr Holder’s interventions have, says Inimai Chettiar of New York University’s Brennan Centre, made this territory safer for Democrats. That is important, even if the number of people in federal prisons actually edged up during Mr Holder’s tenure.