Word: bork
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Within months after Bork had acquired a $400,000-a-year partnership with his old Chicago firm and a $500,000 house, Attorney General William French Smith called offering Bork a spot on the D.C. Court of Appeals. The unspoken understanding was that a good performance would merit Bork top consideration for any Supreme Court vacancy...
...appeals court judge, Bork got involved in a number of controversies. His disdain for the constitutional right to privacy was clear in a strongly worded Bork opinion ruling against a Navy enlistee discharged for homosexual conduct in the barracks. Bork was criticized by more liberal colleagues on the court for what they described as his result oriented tactics. In their view he bent legal principles to achieve the conservative outcome that he reached in almost every case...
...most part, however, Bork found life on the D.C. Appeals Court, with its heavy diet of technical regulatory issues, unexciting. When his colleague and friend Antonin Scalia was named to fill a 1986 Supreme Court vacancy, Bork was gracious publicly but privately irritated, fearing that Reagan would leave office before another seat opened up. Last spring, shortly before he was nominated to replace Lewis Powell, Bork decided not to hire clerks for the 1988 term, opening the way for his resignation at the end of Reagan's term...
...meantime, Bork's personal life had brightened. After a period of loneliness in Washington, he met and soon married Mary Ellen Pohl, a former Sacred Heart nun working for a conservative think tank. "He was raised a Protestant, married a Jew and then a Catholic," notes Ward Bowman, a former Yale law professor. "It's pretty hard to say he's bigoted." Not a member of a church, Bork describes himself as a "generic Protestant...
...advocate of judicial restraint, Bork has not been terribly successful at exercising personal discipline in recent years. He regularly smokes two packs of cigarettes a day, despite promises to himself to quit. After breaking his arm in an accident on icy steps outside his home two years ago, he began losing control of his now Falstaffian weight. A series of exercise machines -- a rowing machine, cross-country machine, stationary bicycle -- sit broken or largely unused in his attic. Bork has taken up poker in a floating game that regularly includes Scalia, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Education Secretary William Bennett...