Robert Heron Bork (1927-2012) was on the faculty for two decades, although he spent several years on leave of absence when he served as Solicitor General of the United States and acting Attorney General.

Robert Bork’s most enduring legacy is his work in the antitrust field. He applied economic theory to demonstrate that much of antitrust doctrine was economically irrational and ultimately detrimental to consumer welfare, which he maintained was the normative goal of antitrust law, based on the intent of the enacting Congress. In the 1960s, Bork published a series of influential articles developing his thesis, including “The Rule of Reason and the Per Se Concept: Price Fixing and Market Division” (pts. 1 & 2), 74 Yale L. J. 775 (1965) and 75 Yale L. J. 373 (1966), one of the most frequently-cited articles in the history of the Yale Law Journal.

In 1978, Bork published The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself, which synthesized and elaborated his earlier work. The book surveyed antitrust case law, criticizing its tendency to protect competitors, rather than competition and maintaining that predatory pricing and harmful product-tying were not tenable business practices and should therefore be abandoned as legal principles.

Also an eminent constitutional law scholar, Bork emphasized the use of original intent to construe the Constitution. In 1982, he was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and left the faculty. He resigned from the Court after the failure of his 1987 nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court and became a research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. The political controversy over his nomination sparked heated debate over the proper role of the Senate in evaluating nominees and of judicial activism in decisionmaking. Bork touched upon these matters in his best-selling book, The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law (1989).

Upon the announcement of his death, Justice Antonin Scalia stated that “Robert Bork was one of the most influential legal scholars of the past 50 years. His impact on legal thinking in the fields of Antitrust and Constitutional Law was profound and lasting.”