Name | Robert Bork |
---|---|
Office | Judge of Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit |
Nominator | Ronald Reagan |
Term start | February 9, 1982 |
Term end | February 5, 1988 |
Predecessor | Carl McGowan |
Successor | Clarence Thomas |
Office2 | United States Attorney GeneralActing |
President2 | Richard Nixon |
Term start2 | October 20, 1973 |
Term end2 | December 17, 1973 |
Predecessor2 | Elliot Richardson |
Successor2 | William Saxbe |
Office3 | United States Solicitor General |
President3 | Richard NixonGerald Ford |
Term start3 | June 1973 |
Term end3 | January 20, 1977 |
Predecessor3 | Erwin Griswold |
Successor3 | Wade McCree |
Birth date | March 01, 1927 |
Birth place | |
Party | Republican Party |
Spouse | Claire Davidson (1952–1980)Mary Ellen Pohl (1982–present) |
Alma mater | University of Chicago |
Religion | Roman Catholicism }} |
Bork attended the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut and earned bachelor's and law degrees from the University of Chicago. While pursuing his bachelor's degree he became a brother of the international social fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta. While pursuing his law degree he served on Law Review. At UC he was awarded a Phi Beta Kappa key with his law degree in 1953 and passed the bar in Illinois that same year. 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. Among his students during this time were Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Anita Hill, Robert Reich, Jerry Brown and John R. Bolton.
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, and 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 legal academia about how the Constitution is to be interpreted.
Some conservatives have criticized Bork's approach. Conservative scholar Harry Jaffa has criticized Bork (along with Rehnquist and Scalia) for failing to adhere to natural law principles. Noted jurisprudential scholar Robert P. George explained Jaffa's critique this way: "He attacks Rehnquist and Scalia and Bork for their embrace of legal positivism that is inconsistent with the doctrine of natural rights that is embedded in the Constitution they are supposed to be interpreting."
On October 20, 1973, Solicitor General Bork was instrumental in the "Saturday Night Massacre", U.S. President Richard Nixon's firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, following Cox's request for tapes of his Oval Office conversations. Nixon initially ordered U.S. Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, to fire Cox. Richardson resigned rather than carry out the order. Richardson's top deputy, Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, also considered the order "fundamentally wrong" and also resigned, making Bork the Acting Attorney General. Bork was also planning on resigning in protest, but Richardson (who had been on the job for just five months before resigning in protest) persuaded Bork to stay on to ensure proper leadership at the top of the Justice Department (Richardson and Ruckelshaus combined had less than a year of service at the time of the Saturday Night Massacre). As such, when Nixon reiterated his order, Bork complied and fired Cox. Bork would remain Acting Attorney General for approximately eight weeks, until the appointment of William B. Saxbe on December 17, 1973.
One of his opinions while on the D.C. Circuit was Dronenburg v. Zech, 741 F.2d 1388, decided in 1984. This case involved James L. Dronenburg, a sailor who had been administratively discharged from the Navy for engaging in homosexual conduct. Dronenburg argued that his discharge violated his right to privacy. This argument was rejected in an opinion written by Bork and joined by (now U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Antonin Scalia, in which Bork critiqued the line of Supreme Court cases upholding a right to privacy. 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 Justice Scalia), who wrote: "no principle had been articulated [by the Supreme Court] that enabled us to determine whether appellant's case fell within or without that principle."
President Reagan nominated Bork for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on July 1, 1987. A hotly contested United States Senate debate over Bork's nomination ensued. Opposition was partly fueled by strong opposition by civil and women's rights groups concerned with Bork's opposition to the authority claimed by the federal government to impose standards of voting fairness upon the states (at his confirmation hearings for the position of Solicitor General, he supported the rights of Southern states to impose a poll tax), and his stated desire to roll back civil rights decisions of the Warren and Burger courts. Bork is one of only three Supreme Court nominees to ever be opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union, along with William Rehnquist and Samuel Alito. Bork was also criticized for being an "advocate of disproportionate powers for the executive branch of Government, almost executive supremacy", most notably, according to critics, for his role in the Saturday Night Massacre, albeit not in a completely willing role.
Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell was a moderate, and even before his expected retirement on June 27, 1987, some Senate Democrats had asked liberal leaders to form "a solid phalanx" to oppose whomever President Ronald Reagan nominated to replace him, assuming it would tilt the court rightward. Democrats also warned Reagan there would be a fight if Bork were nominated. Nevertheless, Reagan nominated Bork for the seat on July 1, 1987.
Following Bork's nomination to the Court, Sen. Ted Kennedy took to the Senate floor with a strong condemnation of Bork 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... 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.
Bork responded, "There was not a line in that speech that was accurate.", and in an obituary of Kennedy, The Economist remarked that Bork may well have been correct, "but it worked." Bork also contended in his best-selling book, The Tempting of America, that the brief prepared for Sen. Joe Biden, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, "so thoroughly misrepresented a plain record that it easily qualifies as world class in the category of scurrility."
TV ads narrated by Gregory Peck attacked Bork as an extremist. Kennedy's speech successfully fueled widespread public skepticism of Bork's nomination. The rapid response to Kennedy's "Robert Bork's America" speech stunned the Reagan White House, and the accusations went unanswered for two and a half months.
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. Dolan justified accessing the list on the ground that Bork himself had stated that Americans only had such privacy rights as afforded them by direct legislation. The incident led to the enactment of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act.
To pro-choice legal groups, Bork's originalist views and his belief that the Constitution does not contain a general "right to privacy" were viewed as a clear signal that, should he become a Justice on the Supreme Court, he would vote to reverse the Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Accordingly, a large number of groups mobilized to press for Bork's rejection, and the resulting 1987 Senate confirmation hearings became an intensely partisan battle. Bork was faulted for his bluntness before the committee, including his criticism of the reasoning underlying Roe v. Wade.
On October 23, 1987, the Senate rejected Bork's confirmation, with 42 Senators voting in favor and 58 voting against. Two Democratic Senators David Boren (D-OK) and Ernest Hollings (D-SC) voted in his favor, with 6 Republican Senators John Chafee (R-RI), Bob Packwood (R-OR), Arlen Specter (then R-PA), Robert Stafford (R-VT), John Warner (R-VA) and Lowell P. Weicker, Jr. (R-CT) all voting nay.
The vacant seat on the court to which Bork was nominated eventually went to Judge Anthony Kennedy who was unanimously approved by the Senate, 97-0.
Bork, unhappy with his treatment in the nomination process, resigned his appellate-court judgeship in 1988.
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 with the aim of preventing his or her appointment to public office; to obstruct or thwart (a person) in this way."
In The Tempting of America (page 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.
In 1999, Bork wrote an essay about Thomas More and attacked jury nullification as a "pernicious practice".
In 2003, he published Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule Of Judges, an American Enterprise Institute book which includes Bork's philosophical objections to the phenomenon of incorporating international ethical and legal guidelines into the fabric of domestic law. In particular, he focuses on the problems he sees as inherent in the federal judiciary of three nations, Israel, Canada, and the United States, countries where he believes the courts have grossly exceeded their discretionary powers, and which have discarded precedent and common law, and in their place substituted their own liberal judgment.
Bork also advocates a modification to the Constitution that would allow Congressional super-majorities to override Supreme Court decisions, similar to the Canadian notwithstanding clause. Though Bork has many moderate critics, some of his arguments have earned criticism from conservatives as well. Although an opponent of gun control, Bork has denounced what he calls the "NRA view" of the Second Amendment, something he describes as the "belief that the constitution guarantees a right to Teflon-coated bullets." Instead, he has argued that the Second Amendment merely guarantees a right to participate in a government militia.
Bork converted to Catholicism in 2003.
In October 2005, Bork publicly criticized the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
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. 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. In May, 2008, Bork and the Yale Club reached a confidential, out-of-court settlement.
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.
On December 15, 2007, Bork endorsed Mitt Romney for President. He repeated this endorsement on August 2, 2011.
A 2008 issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy collected essays in tribute to Bork. Authors included Frank H. Easterbrook, George Priest, and Douglas Ginsburg.
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Category:1927 births Category:American legal scholars Category:American legal writers Category:American political writers Category:American Roman Catholics Category:Ave Maria University faculty Category:Converts to Roman Catholicism from Calvinism Category:Federalist Society members Category:Illinois lawyers Category:Judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Category:Living people Category:Nixon administration personnel Category:Politicians from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Category:Scholars of competition law Category:United States court of appeals judges appointed by Ronald Reagan Category:United States Solicitors General Category:University of Chicago Law School alumni Category:University of Richmond faculty Category:Unsuccessful nominees to the United States Supreme Court Category:Watergate figures Category:Yale Law School faculty
de:Robert Bork es:Robert Bork fr:Robert Bork he:רוברט בורק ja:ロバート・ボーク no:Robert BorkThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Name | Robert |
---|---|
Pronunciation | |
Gender | Male |
Meaning | fame-bright |
Region | Germanic |
Related names | Rob, Robbie, Robin, Rupert, Bob, Bobby, Bert |
Wiktionary entry | Robert |
Articles | Robert |
Footnotes | }} |
After becoming widely used in Continental Europe it entered England in its Old French form Robert, where an Old English cognate form (Hrēodbēorht, Hrodberht, Hrēodbēorð, Hrœdbœrð, Hrœdberð) had existed before the Norman Conquest. The feminine version is Roberta. The Italian form is Roberto.
In Italy during the Second World War, the form of the name, Roberto, briefly acquired a new meaning derived from, and referring to the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis.
;Duke of Normandy
;Franconian Babenbergers/Robertian Capetians
;Kings of France
;King of Naples
;Kings of Scotland
;Medieval
;Saints
Category:English given names Category:German masculine given names Category:Germanic given names Category:Romanian masculine given names
br:Roparzh bg:Робърт da:Robert fr:Robert ja:ロバート no:Robert (andre betydninger) pl:Robert pt:Robert sv:Robert uk:Роберт zh:罗伯特This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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