Judge Robert Bork

What a shame, nearly 20 years since his nomination. It would have been a great thing I believe had Judge Bork been confirmed by the American Senate to the United States Supreme Court. A great and reasoned man he is. It would be neat to have together Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas and a Justice Bork on the Bench. -- GSD

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Heron Bork (born March 1, 1927) is a conservative American legal scholar who advocates the judicial philosophy of originalism. Bork formerly served as Solicitor General, acting Attorney General, and circuit judge for United States Court of Appeals. In 1987, he was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan, but he was not confirmed by the Senate. Currently, Bork is a lawyer, law professor, best-selling author, and fellow at several prominent conservative organizations.

Bork is best known for his theory that the only way to reconcile the role of the judiciary in American government against what he terms the "Madisonian" or "counter-majoritarian" dilemma of the judiciary making law without popular approval is for constitutional adjudication to be guided by the Framers' original understanding of the United States Constitution. Reiterating that it is a court's task to adjudicate and not to "legislate from the bench," he has advocated that judges exercise restraint in deciding cases, emphasizing that the role of the courts is to frame "neutral principles" (a term borrowed from Herbert Wechsler) and not simply ad hoc pronouncements or subjective value judgments.

Bork built on the influential critiques of the Warren Court authored by Alexander Bickel, who criticized the Supreme Court under Warren for shoddy and inconsistent reasoning, undue activism, and misuse of historical materials. Bork's critique was harder-edged than Bickel's, however: he has written, "We are increasingly governed not by law or elected representatives but by an unelected, unrepresentative, unaccountable committee of lawyers applying no will but their own." Bork's writings have influenced the opinions of conservative judges such as Associate Justice Antonin Scalia and former Chief Justice William Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court, and sparked a vigorous debate within the legal academy about how the constitution is to be interpreted.

Bork was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was Harry Philip Bork (1897-1974), a steel company purchasing agent, and his mother was Elisabeth (née Kunkle) (1898-2004), a schoolteacher. He married Claire Davidson in 1952; before she died of cancer in 1980, they had a daughter, Ellen, and two sons, Robert and Charles. In 1982 he married Mary Ellen Pohl, a former Roman Catholic nun.

Bork earned bachelor's and law degrees from the University of Chicago, where he became a brother of the international social fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta, and University of Chicago Law School. After a period of service in the United States Marine Corps, Bork began as a lawyer in private practice in 1954 and then was a professor at Yale Law School from 1962 to 1975 and 1977 to 1981. At Yale, he was best known for writing The Antitrust Paradox, a book in which he argued that consumers were often beneficiaries of corporate mergers, and that many then-current readings of the antitrust laws were economically irrational and hurt consumers. Bork's writings on antitrust law, along with those of Richard Posner and other law and economics thinkers, were heavily influential in causing a shift in the U.S. Supreme Court's approach to antitrust laws since the 1970s.