Catching The Last

Train to the Court

After nearly two decades of living on the relatively modest salary of a law professor and civil servant, Robert Bork went on a spending spree in 1981. Flush with the promise of a partnership worth $400,000 annually in the Washington office of the firm of Kirkland & Ellis, Bork purchased a new BMW sedan and a $500,000 house in the District's fashionable Kent neighborhood. The day he moved into his new home, however, Attorney General William French Smith made him an offer he could not refuse: a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, at an...

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