Justice & Law Quote by Robert Bork

Bork’s complaint is a neat inversion: the institution tasked with guarding the Constitution has, in his telling, outsourced the document to its own gloss. The jab lands because it targets a professional habit law students recognize instantly: you read casebooks, not parchment. You learn the Constitution as filtered through judges’ prose, and that prose becomes the operative reality. Bork isn’t merely nostalgic for founding-era text; he’s accusing the legal academy of training lawyers to treat judicial interpretation as the Constitution, full stop.

The intent is strategic. By framing law schools as places that “study the opinions,” Bork elevates originalism from a methodology into a corrective moral posture: return to the text, stop worshiping the priesthood’s commentary. The subtext is an indictment of legitimacy. If constitutional meaning is mostly case law, then power migrates toward courts and away from democratic politics, a shift Bork spent his career warning about under the label of “judicial activism.” He’s also smuggling in a second critique: legal education is less about civic literacy than professional socialization, reproducing a worldview where precedent and doctrine eclipse first principles.

Context matters. Bork’s career was forged in the conservative backlash to the Warren Court and detonated by his bruising 1987 Supreme Court confirmation fight, where his jurisprudence became a proxy war over rights, culture, and who gets to define the nation’s baseline values. This line is part lament, part rallying cry: if you can persuade people that the Constitution has been replaced by commentary, you can argue that the country needs not just different outcomes, but a different interpretive regime.