Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Bork

Bork’s line is a warning shot disguised as a diagnosis: the law, he argues, doesn’t just drift with elite opinion - it stamps that drift with the authority of bedrock principle. The phrasing is doing heavy rhetorical work. “Winds” makes ideology feel like weather: pervasive, hard to fight, and conveniently blamed when you don’t want to name the people blowing it. “Intellectual or moral fashion” is a cultivated insult, collapsing earnest reform and elite trend-chasing into the same suspect category. Then comes the sharper twist: law doesn’t merely absorb these fashions; it “validates” them, laundering contingent preferences into “commands” and rooting them in “our most basic concept” - a deliberately vague phrase that hints at justice, rights, or the Constitution without conceding which.

The subtext is a distrust of judicial interpretation, especially in areas where courts recognize rights not explicitly enumerated or where constitutional language is treated as evolving. Bork is aiming at what he saw as the postwar liberal legal project: using the courts to settle moral disputes that legislatures can’t or won’t resolve. His complaint isn’t only that judges might be wrong; it’s that their wrongness arrives wearing a crown.

Context matters: Bork became a symbol of this fight during his bruising 1987 Supreme Court confirmation battle, when “Borking” entered the political lexicon and the culture wars moved into constitutional doctrine. The quote works because it frames legal change as a legitimacy crisis: if law turns fashion into foundation, then dissent becomes not just political disagreement but heresy against first principles.