RIP

Robert H. Bork, one of my biggest heroes, requiescat in pacem.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

[L]egal reasoning of the sort that served us for centuries is now utterly outmoded, and a verbal formulation can always be devised to reach the correct political result. … If the Constitution is law, then presumably its meaning, like that of all other law, is the meaning the lawmakers were understood to have intended. If the Constitution is law, then presumably, like all other law, the meaning the lawmakers intended is as binding upon judges as it is upon legislatures and executives. … It is here that the concept of neutral principles, which Wechsler said were essential if the Supreme Court were not to be a naked power organ, comes into play. (The Tempting of America, p. 135, p. 145)

The role of a judge committed to the philosophy of original understanding is not to “choose a level of abstraction.” Rather, it is to find the meaning of a text — a process which includes finding its degree of generality, which is a part of its meaning — and to apply that text to a particular situation. (The Tempting of America pp. 148-9)

This development can be seen in any number of academic, previously intellectual fields. Sometimes called post-modernism or post-structuralism, the denial of truth is, as Gertrude Himmelfarb says, "best know as a school of literary theory. But it is becoming increasingly prominent in such other disciplines as history, philosophy, anthropology, law, and theology..." It is also becoming increasingly difficult to call some of those subjects "disciplines." In every case — the attack on reason, on the concept of truth, and on the idea that there is an objective reality to which we must attempt to make our words and theories correspond — the impetus behind such assaults comes from the political left. … Nonsense these attacks may be, but, as the history of our century teaches, there is no guarantee that nonsense will not prevail, with dire results. In law, philosophy, literary studies, and history, among other subjects, we are raising generations of students who are taught by the "cutting edge" professors that traditional respect for logic, evidence, intellectual honesty, and the other requirements of discipline are not merely passé, but totalitarian and repressive, sustaining existing social, political, and economic arrangements to the benefit of white, heterosexual males. To change society in radical directions, it is said, it is necessary to be rid of the old apparatus. (Slouching towards Gomorrah, pp. 268-9)