'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
As one of Robert Bork's antitrust students, and one of the few student or faculty conservatives at Yale (then or now), I was delighted when Richard Nixon announced in December 1972 that he was nominating Bork to be solicitor general.
When the Senate in 1987 defeated President Reagan's nomination of Robert H. Bork for a seat on the Supreme Court, it blocked the appointment of one of the most superbly qualified individuals ever advanced for the court. Judge Bork had been a Marine, a distinguished professor at two of the nation's finest law schools, a partner in a respected law firm, solicitor general of the United States and a judge on a leading federal appeals court.
How influential was Judge Robert H. Bork in American jurisprudence? It's difficult to capture in just a few paragraphs the legacy of Judge Bork, who died Wednesday at age 85.
America has lost one of its greatest legal thinkers. Robert H. Bork, a jurist, a teacher and a father, passed away Wednesday morning, but his ideas will live on.
The essence of conservativism is fidelity to the reality principle. Not for us, we pride ourselves, the utopian vaporings of the left. In times of stress, however, the temptation for conservatives is to reach for bromides to palliate their sufferings. Ken Blackwell and Ken Klukowski, who display sound political instincts, nevertheless illustrate the dangers of conservative bromides.
Given the enormous historical importance of Nixon's resignation and disgrace, we can only regret that Bork was not able before he died to write a substantially longer memoir.
As he wrote in these pages last year, "The essence of conservatism is fidelity to the reality principle.
