Volume 37, Number 16 · October 25, 1990
Back to Bork
By Lawrence Sager
The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law
by Robert H. Bork
Free Press, 432 pp., $22.50
Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America
by Ethan Bronner
Norton, 399 pp., $22.50
The People Rising: The Campaign Against the Bork Nomination
by Michael Pertschuk, by Wendy Schaetzel
Thunder's Mouth Press, 317 pp., $13.95 (paper)
Three years ago, on October 23, 1987, the Senate voted not to confirm Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Only eleven Supreme Court nominations have been rejected by the Senate, and no nominee has ever been defeated by as large a margin as Bork. Yet no one accused Bork of private vices, or challenged his intellectual competence. The campaign against him attacked his ideas about the Constitution, and his attitude toward those—judges, academics, politicians, and citizens—who held different views from his. The battle was fought not in the back halls of Congress but in public: Bork's opponents conducted an elaborate and effective national campaign in the press and television, and the televised hearings on his confirmation concentrated national attention on the Constitution and on constitutional theory to a degree that has seldom if ever been equaled in our history.
Review, 7129 words
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