A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

IT OFFENDS PEOPLE: I don't mean to step on TPE's post about Bork, but many of us who both write on and read this blog are alumni of the University of Chicago law school, and Bork was both an alumnus and a participant in some important parts of the school's history, and -- without touching on any of the stuff that would require invocation of The Rule -- I wanted to add two additional thoughts:

On Bork as a young man:  Abner Mikva, who taught at the the U of C at the same time that many of us were enrolled there, was a law school classmate and long-time close friend of Bork despite their divergent political views, and he told many fond stories of Bork (including that, in preparation for Bork’s confirmation process, Mikva had advised Bork to “Get rid of the beard – it offends people”).  My favorite was from the famed antitrust class that (future Attorney General) Edward Levi taught for four days a week and seminal U of C economist Aaron Director untaught on the fifth day.  One day, Director made the argument that rent-control laws were bad because they ended up pricing the people they were supposed to help out of the market in the first place, so those laws should never be enacted.  At the end of class, Bork rushed to the lectern, and asked, breathlessly (as Mikva tells it), “but what about the poor widows?  Would you get rid of the rent control laws and put them out on the street?”  “Young man,” Director reportedly replied, “I said you should never enact rent control laws. I didn’t say anything about getting rid of them.”  When I heard the story, Mikva added, with a chuckle, “Bork, he was the biggest bleeding-heart liberal of us all.”* 

On Bork as a writer:  In law school, one of my favorite things about law books was their comprehensive and effusive acknowledgements sections.  The double-acknowledgements section in my version of Bork’s The Antitrust Paradox, which reprinted the original acknowledgements and then added a second acknowledgements section for the anniversary edition, was, to my mind, the pinnacle of this art.  It had a beginning and an ending (if no middle) and told a tale that included friendship, camaraderie, conflict (regarding the reaction to the original publication of the book), triumph, and actual unexpected heartbreak (the death of Bork’s wife).  It was a short thank-you note with all the flavors of a decent novel.  Whatever else one thinks about Bork, and people have certainly thought about him a lot, that acknowledgements section framed him for me in a light in which I think most people (other than Mikva) usually didn’t see him.

*I cannot vouch either for the accuracy of the story as originally told to me or for the accuracy of my recollection of the story.  It was a long time ago.