Robert Bork passed away today at the age of 85. He was best known as President Reagan's failed Supreme Court nominee in 1987 (Anthony Kennedy would later be approved to fill the seat by the Senate), but he also should be known as a long-serving law professor at Yale, the U.S. Solicitor General during Watergate, and a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. No doubt, Judge Bork would have a made a fine Supreme Court Justice and, along with Justices Thomas and Scalia, would have certainly been instrumental in turning over some of the worst decisions of the Court in the past forty plus years (Roe comes immediately to mind).
Ever since the jurisprudence of originalism was brought back into the public mind with the original intent debate between former Attorney General Edwin Meese and Justice William Brennan in 1985, Bork, along with other legal conservatives, helped shaped conservative legal jurisprudence for decades. Bork famously rejected a natural law based jurisprudence--that idea the Constitution can only be properly interpreted by seeing it in light of the principles of the Declaration of Independence--and instead based his jurisprudence mostly on majoritarianism and legal positivism. The debates Bork had with Harry Jaffa and Hadley Arkes among other scholars on this point was, however, crucial to the opening of the conservative mind to this old method of jurisprudence. Though Bork was in error in this respect (Arkes argues in fact that Bork's jurisprudence turned out better than he himself knew), he should be celebrated for his accomplishments in circles both legal and political.
RIP Judge Bork.
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