Right Web

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.

Robert Bork, the conservative icon and former New Deal liberal who moved to the right while a student at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. The confirmation battle, which he eventually lost, is regarded as one of the bitterest fights ever witnessed on the Senate floor. Bork's connections to a passel of far-right conservatives — including Irving Kristol, Antonin Scalia, and Caspar Weinberger — as well as his strong ties to the Federalist Society (which he helped found in the early 1980s) and the American Enterprise Institute helped get him the nomination. [1]

But his controversial positions also led to bitter protest when his nomination was announced. According to the scholar Philip Burch, "Bork's nomination ... ran into a storm of protest [from such groups as] the Alliance for Justice, the American Civil Liberties Union ... the National Abortion Rights Action League, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, an umbrella organization of 30 groups which had helped secure the passage of many of the civil rights acts of the 1960s. ... As one informed source put it, Bork had opposed virtually every civil rights measure on which he had taken a public stance.” [2]

Bork became mired in controversy early on in his political career. In what came to be known as the “Saturday Night Massacre” during the Watergate crisis in October 1973, Bork — then in the Justice Department — fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had issued a subpoena of the tapes of Nixon’s Oval Office conversations, on orders from President Nixon. According to the Washington Post, Nixon “ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson resigned rather than carry out the order, as did Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus. Nixon then turned to Bork, the number three official in the Justice Department, who carried out his wishes and fired Cox. Bork would defend his actions as within the scope of presidential authority. Nine months later, the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon had to turn over the tapes.” [3]

At age 76, in 2003, Bork converted to Catholicism. He joined the faculty of the Ava Maria School of Law, funded by Catholic philanthropist Thomas Monaghan, the former Detroit Tigers owner and Domino’s Pizza founder. According to Bork’s bio on the law school site, “Judge Bork has served with distinction as a judge, lawyer, scholar, government official, and law professor. Early in his career, he was an associate and partner with the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis before joining the faculty at Yale Law School. During the 1970s, Judge Bork held the positions of United States Solicitor General and Acting Attorney General. He subsequently served as a United States Court of Appeals judge for the District of Columbia Circuit. Formerly a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, Judge Bork is currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and the Tad and Dianne Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. The author of numerous books and articles, he has also appeared on many national television programs.” [4]

Bork's books include Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges(2003), The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of Law((1997), Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline(1996), reissued with an afterword in 2003, and The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself, revised in 1993. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute published Judge Bork's A Time to Speakin 2008, a collection of his writings, oral arguments, briefs, and opinions spanning his legal career. The ISI website’s marketing flyer for the book describes Bork as “the legal and moral conscience of America, reminding us of our founding principles and their cultural foundation. The scourge of liberal ideologues both before and after Ronald Reagan nominated him for the Supreme Court in 1987, Bork has for fifty years unwaveringly exposed — and explained — the hypocrisy and dereliction of duty endemic among our nation’s elites, the politicization and adversary activism of our courts, and the consequent degradation of American society.” [5]

Bork is the father of Ellen Bork, a neoconservative activist who has worked for two William Kristol-led pressure groups, the Foreign Policy Initiative and the Project for a New American Century.

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.