Word: bork
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gave away more than 1,000 paperback whodunits to make room for new arrivals. He is an occasional player in an elite poker game often attended by Scalia and Chief Justice of the U.S. William Rehnquist. "He is serious when it comes to his work, which is serious," says Bork's friend, Washington Lawyer Leonard Garment. "He is a merry man when it comes to the general business of life. He is the antithesis of a stuffed judicial robe...
Born in Pittsburgh in 1927, the only child of a steel company purchasing agent and a schoolteacher mother, Bork originally intended to follow in Ernest Hemingway's footsteps by working for newspapers and then writing fiction. A poet-professor at the University of Chicago steered him to the law. At Chicago's law school, free-market economists like Aaron Director inspired his transition from liberal to conservative...
...wonder then that the fight shaping up over Judge Robert Bork, 60, the conservative legal scholar nominated by Reagan last week, promises to be far fiercer than anything that met the President's earlier appointments of Sandra Day O'Connor and Antonin Scalia. By giving the court's right wing a decisive fifth vote, the addition of Bork could be as pivotal as the 1962 appointment of Arthur Goldberg, which consolidated the liberal majority that worked the Warren Court revolution...
Under the heat and pressure of the challenge, the judicial confirmation process seems to be changing shape. In recent times the Senate's scrutiny of presidential court appointees has been limited chiefly to questions of their legal ability and ethical fitness. Last week, however, Bork's opponents in the Democrat-controlled Senate were moving toward a frank confrontation over ideology. Michigan Democrat Carl Levin is talking the language of senatorial prerogative when he says, "The President has a right to look for a strict constructionist; the Senate has a right to look for a fair constructionist...
...involve smoking guns or skeletons," says Nan Aron of Alliance for Justice, a public-interest law group. "It's going to come down to philosophy." A no-holds-barred tone was quickly set for the Senate debate in a scathing speech by Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy: "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 government...