Word: bork
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gift when Robert Bork was named Solicitor General, his Yale law students gave him a construction worker's hard hat with his new title on it. That was , in 1973, when a hard hat still symbolized the bareknuckle school of conservatism. Bork's own methods of persuasion are a good deal less belligerent, but the joke was to the point. He had built his reputation as a legal hard-liner, both for his narrow reading of the Constitution and for the conservative results of such analysis. When he moved later into the offices of a federal judge, he brought...
...that he has a chance to hang it in the chambers of the Supreme Court, a fight has been raging over just what kind of constitutional construction Bork would practice there. His writings and public statements, plentiful and forcefully expressed, make clear his scorn for many of the court's landmark decisions; they are less clear about which of those he would actually seek to overturn. Despite the instances where Bork has stepped back from earlier positions, and the ambiguity of some of his appeals court rulings, one thing is clear from his 25 years of unflinching and outspoken legal...
...Bork's special scorn has been reserved for the court's expansions of individual and civil rights in the past four decades. Among the decisions that Bork has blasted as groundless and unconstitutional: a seminal 1948 decision, Shelley v. Kraemer, that denied state courts the authority to enforce racially restrictive agreements between sellers and buyers; Griswold v. Connecticut, which in 1965 struck down a state law forbidding the use of contraceptives even by married couples; the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that extended the right of privacy to protect abortion; and the 1978 Bakke v. University of California decision that...
Those rulings have reshaped American life -- which is precisely Bork's complaint. He accuses the recent court of liberal "judicial activism," using its power to accomplish social goals that have eluded -- or been opposed by -- legislatures. His own philosophy, he claims, is based on fealty to "neutral principles," the notion that judges should not formulate their legal principles based on the outcome they will produce in the particular case being heard. And yet, as his opponents point out, Bork's record makes him appear to be result-oriented in his own way: in almost all of the court rulings...
...restraint," the idea that judges should defer to legislative and Executive decisions. Unless a clear constitutional right is violated, he believes, the majority through its elected officials may impose its will on the minority, even if judges consider the resulting laws to be insidious or unwise. For example, though Bork has argued that the court did not have the constitutional justification to strike down the anticontraceptive law in the Griswold case, he has spoken disparagingly of the statute itself. "Even if we assume that courts have superior capacities for dealing with matters of principle," he writes, "it does not follow...