Robert Bork
Robert Bork | |
|---|---|
 Bork in 2005 | |
| Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit | |
| In office February 9, 1982 – February 5, 1988 | |
| Appointed by | Ronald Reagan |
| Preceded by | Carl E. McGowan |
| Succeeded by | Clarence Thomas |
| United States Attorney General | |
| Acting October 20, 1973 – January 4, 1974 | |
| President | Richard Nixon |
| Preceded by | Elliot Richardson |
| Succeeded by | William B. Saxbe |
| 35th Solicitor General of the United States | |
| In office March 21, 1973 – January 20, 1977 | |
| President | |
| Preceded by | Erwin Griswold |
| Succeeded by | Wade H. McCree |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Robert Heron Bork March 1, 1927 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | December 19, 2012 (aged 85) Arlington, Virginia, U.S. |
| Resting place | Fairfax Memorial Park |
| Spouses |
|
| Children | 3 |
| Education | University of Chicago (BA, JD) |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance |  United States |
| Branch/service |  United States Marine Corps |
| Rank |  Second lieutenant |
| Battles/wars | Korean War |
| This article is part of a series on |
| Conservatism in the United States |
|---|
 |
Robert Heron Bork (March 1, 1927 – December 19, 2012)[1] was an American legal scholar who served as solicitor general of the United States from 1973 until 1977. A professor by training, he was acting United States Attorney General and a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1982 to 1988. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the Senate rejected his nomination after a contentious and highly publicized confirmation hearing.
Bork was born in
From 1973 to 1977, he served as Solicitor General under Presidents
In 1982, President Reagan appointed Bork to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In 1987, Reagan nominated Bork to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. His nomination attracted unprecedented media attention and efforts by interest groups to mobilize opposition to his confirmation,[4] primarily due to his outspoken criticism of the Warren and Burger Courts and his role in the Saturday Night Massacre. His nomination was ultimately rejected in the Senate, 42–58, and the vacancy was filled by Anthony Kennedy. Bork resigned from his judgeship in 1988, taking up a career as an author. He served as a professor at various institutions, including the George Mason University School of Law. He advised presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at the Hudson Institute.
Early life and education
Bork was born on March 1, 1927, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.[5] He was the only child of Harry Philip Bork Jr. (1897–1974), a steel company purchasing agent, and Elizabeth (née Kunkle; 1898–2004), a schoolteacher.[6] His father was of German and Irish ancestry, while his mother was of Pennsylvania German descent.[7]
Bork attended the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut.[8] He later recalled that he spent his time there "reading books and arguing with people".[5] He then attended the University of Chicago, where he was a member of the international social fraternity Phi Gamma Delta and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1948. He then attended the University of Chicago Law School, where he was an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. He graduated in 1953 with a Juris Doctor and membership in the Order of the Coif and Phi Beta Kappa. While in law school, Bork took a two-year leave of absence to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War.
Academic career
After law school, Bork spent another year in military service, then entered private practice in 1954 as an associate at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis and Willkie Farr & Gallagher.[5][9] In 1962, Bork left private practice and joined the faculty of Yale Law School as a professor. He taught at Yale from 1962 to 1981, with a four-year break from 1973 to 1977 when he served as U.S. Solicitor General. Among Bork's students at Yale Law were Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Anita Hill, Robert Reich, Jerry Brown, Linda Greenhouse, John Bolton, Samuel Issacharoff, and Cynthia Estlund.[10][11]
As a law professor, Bork was best known for his 1978 book
Solicitor General
Bork served as
"Saturday Night Massacre"
(Gerald_Ford_Library)_(cropped).jpg)
On October 20, 1973, Solicitor General Bork was part of the "
United States Circuit Judge
Bork was a circuit judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1982 to 1988. He was nominated by President Ronald Reagan on December 7, 1981, was confirmed via voice vote by the Senate on February 8, 1982,[19] and received his commission on February 9, 1982.
One of Bork's opinions while on the D.C. Circuit was Dronenburg v. Zech, 741 F.2d 1388,[20] decided in 1984. The case involved James L. Dronenburg, a sailor who had been administratively discharged from the United States Navy for engaging in homosexual conduct. Dronenburg argued that his discharge violated his right to privacy. His argument was rejected in an opinion written by Bork and joined by Antonin Scalia, in which Bork critiqued the line of Supreme Court cases upholding a right to privacy.[20]
In rejecting Dronenburg's suggestion for a rehearing en banc, the D.C. Circuit issued four separate opinions, including one by Bork (again joined by Scalia), who wrote that "no principle had been articulated [by the Supreme Court] that enabled us to determine whether appellant's case fell within or without that principle."[21]
In 1986, President Reagan considered nominating Bork to the Supreme Court after
U.S. Supreme Court nomination
President Reagan nominated Bork for associate justice of the Supreme Court on July 1, 1987, to replace retiring Associate Justice
Before Justice Powell's expected retirement on June 27, 1987, some Senate Democrats had asked liberal leaders to "form a 'solid phalanx' of opposition" if President Reagan nominated an "ideological extremist" to replace him, assuming it would tilt the court rightward.[27] Democrats warned Reagan there would be a fight if Bork were nominated.[28] Nevertheless, Reagan nominated Bork for Powell's seat on July 1, 1987.
Following Bork's nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy took to the Senate floor with a strong condemnation of him, declaring:
Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is--and is often the only--protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy. ... The damage that President Reagan will do through this nomination, if it is not rejected by the Senate, could live on far beyond the end of his presidential term. President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.[29][30]
Bork responded, "There was not a line in that speech that was accurate."
Television advertisements produced by
During debate over his nomination, Bork's video rental history was leaked to the press. His video rental history was unremarkable, and included such harmless titles as A Day at the Races, Ruthless People, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Writer Michael Dolan, who obtained a copy of the hand-written list of rentals wrote about it for the Washington City Paper.[37] Dolan justified accessing the list on the ground that Bork himself had stated that Americans had only such privacy rights as afforded them by direct legislation. The incident led to the enactment of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act.[38][39]
To pro-choice rights legal groups, Bork's originalist views and his belief that the Constitution did not contain a general "right to privacy" were viewed as a clear signal that, should he become a justice of the Supreme Court, he would vote to completely overrule the Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Accordingly, a large number of groups mobilized to press for Bork's rejection, and the 1987 Senate confirmation hearings became an intensely partisan battle.
On October 23, 1987, the Senate denied Bork's confirmation, with 42 senators voting in favor and 58 senators voting against. Two Democratic senators (David Boren of Oklahoma, and Fritz Hollings of South Carolina) voted in favor of his nomination, while six Republican senators (John Chafee of Rhode Island, Bob Packwood of Oregon, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Robert Stafford of Vermont, John Warner of Virginia, and Lowell Weicker of Connecticut) voted against it.[40] His defeat in the Senate was the worst of any Supreme Court nominee since George Washington Woodward was defeated 20–29 in 1845, and the third-worst on record.
The seat to which Bork had been nominated went to Judge Anthony Kennedy, who was unanimously approved by the Senate, 97–0.[41] Bork, unhappy with his treatment in the nomination process, resigned his appellate court judgeship in 1988.[42]
"Bork" as a verb
According to columnist William Safire, the first published use of "bork" as a verb was possibly in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of August 20, 1987, two months prior to the final vote: "Let's just hope something enduring results for the justice-to-be, like a new verb: Borked."[43] A well known use of the verb "to bork" occurred in July 1991 at a conference of the National Organization for Women in New York City. Feminist Florynce Kennedy addressed the conference on the importance of defeating the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, saying: "We're going to bork him. We're going to kill him politically. This little creep, where did he come from?"[44] Thomas was confirmed after the most divisive confirmation hearing in Supreme Court history to that point.
In March 2002, the Oxford English Dictionary added an entry for the verb "bork" as U.S. political slang, with this definition: "To defame or vilify (a person) systematically, esp. in the mass media, usually to prevent his or her appointment to public office; to obstruct or thwart (a person) in this way."[45] Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh used the term during his own contentious Senate confirmation hearing testimony, when he stated: "The behavior of several of the Democratic members of this committee at my hearing a few weeks ago was an embarrassment. But at least it was just a good old-fashioned attempt at borking."[46]
Later work
Following his failure to be confirmed, Bork resigned his seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and was for several years both a professor at
Bork later served as a fellow at the Hudson Institute, a visiting professor at the University of Richmond School of Law and a professor at Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, Florida.[47] In 2011, he worked as a legal adviser for the presidential campaign of Republican Mitt Romney.[48]
Advocacy of originalism
Bork is known by
Bork built on the influential critiques of the
Some conservatives criticized Bork's approach. Conservative scholar
Works and views
Bork wrote several books, including the two best-sellers The Tempting of America, about his judicial philosophy and his nomination battle, and Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, in which he argued that the rise of the New Left in the 1960s in the U.S. undermined the moral standards necessary for civil society, and spawned a generation of intellectuals who oppose Western civilization. During the period these books were written, as well as most of his adult life, Bork was an agnostic, a fact used pejoratively behind the scenes by Southern Democrats when speaking to their evangelical constituents during his Supreme Court nomination process.[citation needed] Bork's 1971 Indiana Law Journal article "Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems" has been identified as one of the most cited legal articles of all time.[55]
In The Tempting of America, p. 82, Bork explained his support for the Supreme Court's desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education:
By 1954, when Brown came up for decision, it had been apparent for some time that segregation rarely if ever produced equality. Quite aside from any question of psychology, the physical facilities provided for blacks were not as good as those provided for whites. That had been demonstrated in a long series of cases… The Court's realistic choice, therefore, was either to abandon the quest for equality by allowing segregation or to forbid segregation in order to achieve equality. There was no third choice. Either choice would violate one aspect of the original understanding, but there was no possibility of avoiding that. Since equality and segregation were mutually inconsistent, though the ratifiers did not understand that, both could not be honored. When that is seen, it is obvious the Court must choose equality and prohibit state-imposed segregation. The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.
| External videos | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Interview with Bork on The Tempting of America, February 26, 1990, racial discrimination by public accommodations were based on a principle of "unsurpassed ugliness".[56][57] He came to repudiate his earlier views, saying in his 1987 confirmation hearing that the Civil Rights Act and other racial equality legislation of the 1960s "helped bring the nation together in ways which otherwise would not have occurred."[58] Bork opposed the 1965 Supreme Court ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut, which struck down a Connecticut Comstock Act of 1873 that prohibited the use of contraceptives for married couples.[59] Bork said the decision was "utterly specious", "unprincipled" and "intellectually empty".[59] Bork argued that the Constitution only protected speech that was "explicitly political", and that there were no free speech protections for "scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic."[60]
Bork was known for his disregard for the Ninth Amendment. When asked about his views on unenumerated constitutional rights during his confirmation hearings by Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini, Bork famously compared the Ninth Amendment to an uninterpretable inkblot, too vague for judges to meaningfully enforce.[61][62][63] In 1998, he reviewed High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, conservative pundit Ann Coulter's book on impeaching Clinton, pointing out that "'High crimes and misdemeanors' are not limited to actions that are crimes under federal law."[64] In 1999, Bork wrote an essay about Thomas More and attacked jury nullification as a "pernicious practice".[65] Bork once quoted More in summarizing his judicial philosophy.[66] In 2003, he published Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges, an American Enterprise Institute book that includes Bork's philosophical objections to the phenomenon of incorporating international ethical and legal guidelines into the fabric of domestic law. In particular, he focused on problems he viewed as inherent in the federal judiciaries of Israel, Canada, and the United States— countries where he believes courts have exceeded their discretionary powers, discarded precedent and common law and instead substituted their own liberal judgment. Bork advocated modifying the NRA view" of the Second Amendment, something he described as the "belief that the constitution guarantees a right to Teflon-coated bullets." Instead, he argued that the Second Amendment merely guarantees a right to participate in a government militia, that its intent was to guarantee the right of militia membership, not an individual right to bear arms.[68][69] He is quoted as saying that the gun lobby's interpretation of the Second Amendment was intentional deception, not "law as integrity," and that states could technically pass a ban on assault weapons.[70][68]
Bork converted to Catholicism from Presbyterianism in 2003.[71] In October 2005, Bork publicly criticized the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, saying her nomination was "a disaster on every level."[72][73] On June 6, 2007, Bork filed suit in federal court in New York City against the Yale Club over an incident that had occurred a year earlier. Bork alleged that, while trying to reach the dais to speak at an event, he fell, because of the Yale Club's failure to provide any steps or handrail between the floor and the dais. (After his fall, he successfully climbed to the dais and delivered his speech.)[74] According to the complaint, Bork's injuries required surgery, immobilized him for months, forced him to use a cane, and left him with a limp.[75] In May 2008, Bork and the Yale Club reached a confidential, out-of-court settlement.[76]
On June 7, 2007, Bork with several others authored an amicus brief on behalf of Scooter Libby arguing that there was a substantial constitutional question regarding the appointment of the prosecutor in the case, reviving the debate that had previously resulted in the Morrison v. Olson decision.[77] On December 15, 2007, Bork endorsed Mitt Romney for president. He repeated this endorsement on August 2, 2011, during Romney's second campaign for the White House. A 2008 issue of the Personal lifeBork was married to Claire Davidson from 1952 until her death from cancer in 1980. They had a daughter, Ellen, and two sons, Robert Bork Jr. and Charles Bork. In 1982, he married Mary Ellen Pohl, Bork died of complications from heart disease at the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Virginia, on December 19, 2012.[81][42][82] Following his death, Scalia referred to Bork as "one of the most influential legal scholars of the past 50 years" and "a good man and a loyal citizen". He is interred at Fairfax Memorial Park .
Selected writings
See also
References
Bibliography
External links Wikiquote has quotations related to Robert Bork.  Look up bork in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.  Wikisource has original text related to this article:
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
