This occasioned a rare instance of criticism, in The Daily News, which scolded Mr. Schneiderman in September for letting his actions be guided “by political considerations.” The New York Post is also on the attack. Two weeks ago, it published an article gleefully announcing that a 36-year-old lawyer in Mr. Schneiderman’s office was moonlighting as a professional dominatrix. (She has been suspended.) Weeks before that, in an editorial criticizing his objection to the settlement, it slighted Mr. Schneiderman himself — in a strange affront to the city — as an “ambitious, liberal New York pol.”

He is, of course, all those things: a former state senator, from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in the health-food-eating, yoga-practicing, self-consciously progressive mold. His establishment bona fides are impeccable (the Trinity School, Amherst College, Harvard Law). Before he entered public life, he was — minor slip — a corporate lawyer, with Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, where he represented clients like the American Stock Exchange and Merrill Lynch. But even this potential stain on his do-gooding record was balanced by a side practice in public-interest law.

When Mr. Cuomo announced that he was running for governor last year, Mr. Schneiderman campaigned to succeed him, erecting a platform on the defense of abortion rights, support for same-sex marriage and a pledge to monitor Wall Street. He emerged from a fractious, five-way Democratic primary as the race’s most liberal candidate and defeated his Republican opponent, Daniel M. Donovan Jr., the Staten Island district attorney, even though Mr. Donovan won endorsements from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and former Mayors Edward I. Koch and Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Mr. Schneiderman said he did not seek the office exclusively to battle with the banks. (His other notable cases include suing the federal government to require a study of a method of natural gas extraction and trying to have the federal Defense of Marriage Act ruled unconstitutional.)

“I’m just doing my job,” he said, a second time. “At heart, Americans are not cynical people. I think they want to believe that there’s one set of rules for everybody, that there are still good cops on the beat to keep things honest. I guess they like it that I’m doing an investigation and trying to hold people accountable.”

As for the public commendation — there are Support Schneiderman petitions on the Internet, and 21 New York Congressional representatives signed a letter in August praising his behavior in the banking case — Mr. Schneiderman said he was not surprised so much by its existence as by its intensity and longevity and the variety of forms it has assumed.

“Look,” he said, “I think I may be the only person in history to ever get favorable op-ed columns by Katrina vanden Heuvel,” the left-leaning editor of The Nation magazine, “and Alfonse D’Amato,” the right-leaning former senator from Long Island.