Justice & Law Quote by Robert Bork

Bork’s sentence is a warning dressed up as a definition. By insisting that “the moral content of law” must come from framers and legislators “never” from judges, he’s doing two things at once: narrowing the job description of courts and staking a claim about who gets to steer a democracy’s moral compass. The absolutist “never” isn’t casual; it’s a barricade against a style of jurisprudence he saw as elite moral improvisation, where constitutional adjudication becomes a kind of robed legislation.

The specific intent is to defend democratic legitimacy. Legislators, however flawed, can be voted out; judges largely cannot. So Bork frames judicial moral reasoning as anti-democratic not because morality is bad, but because the wrong institution is supplying it. The subtext is distrust: of “living Constitution” arguments, of privacy and autonomy doctrines built from penumbras and implications, of courts reading contemporary values into old text. Underneath, it’s also a bid to rehabilitate majoritarianism as a moral principle in itself: if the people’s representatives decide, the decision is morally authorized by process.

Context matters: Bork’s rise and fall played out amid the post-Warren Court backlash and the culture-war fights over civil rights, reproductive freedom, and criminal procedure. His 1987 Supreme Court nomination detonated precisely because opponents heard, in lines like this, not procedural modesty but permission to roll back judicially protected rights. That’s why the quote works rhetorically: it sounds like humility while carrying a hard edge. It reframes moral controversy as a jurisdictional error, shifting the real argument from “what is right?” to “who gets to say?”