Word: borke
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Although Reagan is not well acquainted with his new nominee, he is thoroughly comfortable with Bork's judicial philosophy. The operative terms of Bork's legal vocabulary are "strict" and "narrow." Rights must appear in the text of the Constitution before they can be enforced by the court. Accordingly, he rejects such notions as a broad constitutional right to privacy, which William O. Douglas detected in 1965 by peering into the "penumbras" of several constitutional guarantees, including the Fourth Amendment right to be secure in one's home. Asked recently by TIME if he found a right to privacy anywhere...
That view makes Bork unsympathetic to the court's 1973 pronouncement in Roe v. Wade of a right to abortion -- he has called Roe an "unconstitutional decision" -- and unsupportive of arguments favoring a right to homosexual conduct. Conversely, since the Constitution explicitly mentions the death penalty, Bork believes the court cannot forbid...
Under Senate questioning before being confirmed as Solicitor General in 1973, Bork recanted the views he expressed in the New Republic ten years earlier, when he condemned federal legislation requiring hotels, bars and restaurants to serve black customers and grumbled that it compelled people to mix with those with whom they did not wish to associate. Bork says he has also stepped back from the radically narrow view of free speech he suggested in a 1971 law-review article. At the time, Bork stated that the First Amendment protects only "speech that is explicitly political" and extends no guarantees...
...Bork's jurisprudence is deferential -- to the decisions of elected bodies, the power of states and the prerogatives of the President. "Courts ought not to do any more than the Constitution or the legislature intended them to do," he told TIME. That brand of judicial deference has a silver lining for liberals. It also encourages a reluctance to overturn earlier court decisions, even those he believes to be mistaken, once they have become entrenched in law and subsequent court rulings. (He has never said, however, whether he thinks the abortion decision belongs in that category.) "He respects tradition, precedent...
NATION: Robert Bork' s nomination to the Supreme Court ignites a fierce struggle...