Robert Bork

Robert Heron Bork ( born March 1, 1927 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, † December 19, 2012 in Arlington County, Virginia) was an American lawyer and United States Solicitor General.

Biography

The son of a commercial agent from the steel industry and a teacher made ​​after attending the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut 1945-1946 military service in the U.S. Marine Corps ( USMC), and then studied at the University of Chicago, where he in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts ( BA ) acquired. He then completed a post -graduate studies at the University of Chicago and completed this in 1953 with a Juris Doctor (JD). During his studies he joined the Phi Delta Phi jurisprudential compounds and Phi Beta Kappa. In the meantime, he served during the time of the Korean War from 1950 to 1952 in the reserves of the USMC. He then worked as a lawyer.

In June 1973, he was appointed by U.S. President Richard Nixon to the Solicitor General and adopted so as successor by Erwin Griswold to third place in the Ministry of Justice of the United States. In this role he played during the Watergate scandal a crucial role when he dismissed the state special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the so-called Saturday Night Massacre on the instructions of the President on 20 October 1973 after previously Justice Minister Elliot L. Richardson and Deputy Justice Minister ( Deputy Attorney General ) William Ruckelshaus had refused and had resigned. Bork himself was then for a short time from October 20th to December 17, 1973 Office of the Minister of Justice ( Acting Attorney General ). The Office of the Solicitor General Bork held until the end of the presidency of Gerald Ford in January 1977.

In 1982 he was appointed judge of the competent for the District of Columbia U.S. Court of Appeals. This federal appeals court, he belonged to until 1988.

1987 Republican Bork by President Ronald Reagan ( Associate Justice) was nominated U.S. Supreme Court as a candidate for the office of assessors judge. However, this nomination eventually failed due to its highly conservative stance in rejecting the U.S. Senate.

The aggressive and catchy campaign, which was run by left-liberal forces against Bork's nomination ( the most influential, associated organizations were Planned Parenthood, the AFL -CIO, NARAL, the NAACP and People For the American Way ), led to the coining of a new verb in American English: to bork someone means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a person to defame or denigrate systematically in order to damage their (public ) career.

Even within the Republican Party, there was opposition to Bork, in particular by Senator Arlen Specter, a longtime Republican member of the Judiciary Committee. On 23 October 1987, the United States Senate finally voted 58 to 42 against Bork's nomination. Instead Bork, Anthony Kennedy was nominated as Associate Justice and appointed on 18 February 1988 Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Bork, who converted to Catholicism in 2003, was also involved in several associations and organizations, and belonged to the Texas Review of Law & Politics and the Defenders of Property Rights (defender of property rights ) as a member of the advisory body to. In addition, he was a member of the Political Bureau of the American Civil Rights Union and a board member of Restoring the American Dream.

Bork died in December 2012 at the age of 85 years.

Publications

Bork was also the author of several books on jurisprudence and political issues. Among his most important publications include:

• The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law, Simon & Schuster, 1991
• Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, Harper Collins, 1996
• Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges, American Enterprise Institute, 2003