Hartford - The end is drawing near for Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz's legal battle to establish her eligibility to serve as Connecticut's next attorney general.

Attorneys representing Bysiewicz, the state Democratic and Republican parties and Bysiewicz's office appeared Tuesday in Hartford Superior Court for two long sessions of argument before Judge Michael Sheldon. Sheldon will rule on the meaning of the state's qualifying standards for attorneys general, and also whether those existing standards are constitutional.

Bysiewicz has sued the state Democratic party and her own office in an effort to prove that she meets the existing standard of legal experience for an attorney general - 10 years of active practice at the Connecticut bar. Bysiewicz argues that the combination of her four years in private practice and her work as Secretary of the State should enable her to meet that standard.

Bysiewicz's suit also challenges the constitutionality of the standard itself.

In court on Tuesday morning, one of Bysiewicz's attorneys, Daniel Krisch, argued that her lack of litigation experience was "totally irrelevant."

And while Eliot Gersten, representing the Connecticut Republican Party, argued that Bysiewicz's team had produced little evidence that the legal opinions on election law were Bysiewicz' own work, Krisch said her expertise was evident, advertised or not.

"The fact that she did not say, 'By the way, I'm a lawyer,' does not mean she was not providing legal advice," Krisch said, in reference to one of the exhibits Bysiewicz's office produced.

But those letters and memos rarely if ever showed Bysiewicz's personal handiwork, Gersten charged. Her relationship to the staff lawyers in her office was akin to that of a client, or a company's CEO, he said, not that of a member of the legal team truly helping to analyze law and pronounce opinions.

In some of the documents Bysiewicz produced, she was simply relaying the legal judgments of others, including Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, to her correspondents, Gersten said.

"We brought that out on cross," he said, referring to his earlier cross-examination of Bysiewicz on the content of her official duties. "She's relying on the advice of her lawyer, and transmitting it to the recipient."

But Sheldon tilted his hand slightly, telling Gersten at one point that he thought the argument that Bysiewicz' providing advice to town election officials and others on how to interpret state election laws represented "the best claim that has been made" that her service as secretary of the state constituted practice of law.

Meanwhile, Bysiewicz's attorneys didn't revisit her previous argument that an attorney who had been admitted to the bar would still be engaged in "active practice" under state law, even if he or she were engaged in totally different work, like teaching kindergarten or singing in a band.

Gersten said it appeared Bysiewicz' team was "abandoning" that claim, a position Krisch disputed, while acknowledging that it was "not our strongest argument."

"I'll put that in the concession column," Sheldon told him.

Arguments will continue Wednesday in Hartford on the court's subject matter jurisdiction to decide the Bysiewicz case.

t.mann@theday.com