Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Bork

Bork’s line is a lawyerly warning dressed up as a dare: once judges start grading legislative distinctions for “legitimacy,” they don’t just interpret statutes, they acquire a veto over the entire project of democratic lawmaking. The sentence works by pushing a seemingly modest judicial move to its logical extreme. All legislation “makes distinctions” is both obvious and devastating; it turns the judge’s claim of neutral principle into a slippery instrument of will.

The specific intent is to defend judicial restraint and to attack a style of constitutional reasoning that treats courts as roaming moral arbiters. Bork is arguing that if “legitimate” isn’t anchored to something external and disciplined (text, original meaning, enumerated powers, clear constitutional prohibitions), it becomes a taste test. Judges can always find a distinction arbitrary, underinclusive, overinclusive, irrational, or improperly motivated. In that sense, “legitimacy” becomes a back door for policy preferences.

The subtext is institutional and political: the real fight isn’t about one statute, it’s about who gets to govern. Bork frames the judiciary’s legitimacy as contingent on self-limitation; the moment it starts selecting which legislative line-drawings deserve respect, it risks converting constitutional review into a sustained critique of legislation as such.

Context matters. Bork’s career unfolded amid the late-20th-century backlash to the Warren Court and the rise of originalism as an answer to decisions conservatives saw as inventing rights and rules. Read that way, the quote is less a neutral observation than a strategic boundary line: keep judges inside the interpretive fence, or they’ll end up running the whole farm.