Word: bork
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Access to the courts. As an appeals judge, Bork also took a narrow view of the right of plaintiffs to bring their cases before the court. Accordingly, he voted to dismiss suits brought by veterans, the homeless, the handicapped and consumer groups. Opponents point out that he has rarely ruled this way against business plaintiffs. In one widely noted case, he also dissented when his colleagues upheld the right of a bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives to bring suit in opposition to President Reagan's use of a pocket veto. Bork went so far there as to assert that...
Antitrust. Bork has had formidable influence in the field of antitrust, his legal specialty. His view that Congress, which entered the fray with the 1890 Sherman Act, intended to prohibit only those mergers that discourage "economic efficiency" has many followers in the antitrust division of the Reagan Justice Department. Bork finds fault with most of the subsequent attempts by Congress to define anticompetitive practices and to interfere with vertical mergers. Deferential to legislatures in most constitutional disputes, Bork becomes positively Swiftian in his gloom about their capabilities in the economic field: "Congress as a whole is institutionally incapable...
...recent study by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen Litigation Group claims that in most split decisions on the appeals bench, Bork favored businesses when they brought suit against the government but favored government when the plaintiff was an individual or public interest group. That raises the question of whether the principles he invokes are always "neutral." It takes a strong man never to put his intellect at the disposal of his convictions...
Certainly not all of Bork's rulings come out conservative. He authored an opinion for a three-member panel that ordered the Washington, D.C., transit authority to allow an artist to rent display space in subway stations for a poster critical of Reagan. But have his principles sometimes shifted to serve his ideological preferences? In attacking a proposed civil rights law in 1963, he wrote that it would be regrettable if "justifiable abhorrence of racial discrimination ((should)) result in legislation by which the morals of the majority are self-righteously imposed upon a minority...
...embrace the opposite position concerning the broader question of public morality. In a speech before the conservative American Enterprise Institute that touched upon public obscenity, he declared, "One of the freedoms, the major freedom, of our kind of society is the freedom to choose to have a public morality." Bork's supporters say that turnaround shows his willingness to evolve philosophically. Opponents say it is the intellectual expediency of a man more provoked by the sight of obscene words than by signs reading WHITES ONLY...