The Law According to Bork

Where would his strict constructionism lead him -- and the court?

As a gift when Robert Bork was named Solicitor General, his Yale law students gave him a construction worker's hard hat with his new title on it. That was , in 1973, when a hard hat still symbolized the bareknuckle school of conservatism. Bork's own methods of persuasion are a good deal less belligerent, but the joke was to the point. He had built his reputation as a legal hard-liner, both for his narrow reading of the Constitution and for the conservative results of such analysis. When he moved later into the offices of a federal judge, he brought the hard...

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