Word: bork
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...advice of a high school teacher, Bork headed for the University of Chicago, which was bubbling with intellectual creativity under its young president, Robert Hutchins. The university encouraged independent thinking, and Bork flourished there. A Phi Beta Kappa, he was a poll watcher for a Chicago professor running for Vice President on the Socialist ticket...
...Bork's ambition was to follow Ernest Hemingway into newspaper reporting and book writing. But because Chicago had granted Bork a B.A. in less than two years, Columbia University refused to send him a journalism school application. So he turned instead to Chicago's law school. The first classroom professor he encountered there was Edward Levi, an antitrust scholar who later became Attorney General and Bork's boss under Gerald Ford. "He was the most fantastic teacher I ever knew," Bork says. "He took the big ideas in the law and played with them, always by indirection." Levi's technique...
...Bork's publication of his theories sowed the first seeds of his current trouble. Writing in popular journals, starting with the New Republic in 1963, Bork attacked the proposed Public Accommodations Act, a civil rights measure, as an unconstitutional infringement of the right to free association. In 1968, at the culmination of his libertarian phase, he wrote a FORTUNE article advocating judicial protection for a variety of liberties, including privacy, not specifically mentioned in the Constitution...
...views on privacy and other libertarian ideals soon changed radically, - when Bork realized that his ideological outlook had taken another turn. After a year's sabbatical in England with his family, he returned to Yale in 1969 to find that his once lively seminar with Bickel had "gone flat." Recalls Bork: "When I asked him why, Bickel explained, 'It's because you're not saying those crazy things anymore.' I suddenly realized I'd basically adopted his position." He abandoned his belief that constitutional law could be made to conform to rigid ideological or economic principles. "I gave up trying...
...revelation eventually resulted in Bork's famous 1971 Indiana Law Journal article repudiating his prior attempts to find unwritten protections in the Constitution. In its place was Bork's version of what academics call interpretivism, or intentionalism. Unless the Constitution clearly specifies the protection of a core value, Bork wrote, "there is no principled way to prefer any claimed human value to any other." Only the "original intent" of the Constitution's framers should be used by judges in finding constitutionally protected values, he declared...