Robert Bork Gets a Job

Robert Bork has joined the faculty of the law school at the University of Richmond. According to the press release announcing his appointment,

"Judge Bork is one of the most prominent and controversial American legal intellectuals of modern times," Smolla said in announcing the appointment. "He is widely regarded as one of the most influential conservative constitutional law thinkers in America."

So far, so good. Hard to argue with that, Bork is both controversial and influential. But here's where we hit a roadblock:

Bork developed his theories of constitutional law while professor at Yale Law School, where he was Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Public Law. His work emphasized remaining faithful to the text of the Constitution and to the "original understanding" of the framers. He is also an exponent of "neutral principles" of constitutional law, a concept that attempts to separate constitutional interpretation from partisan politics and ideology.

Wow. Someone presumably wrote that with a straight face. I find the notion that Bork in any way attempts to separate his constitutional interpretation from ideology and partisan politics to be fairly silly. Can you think of a more ideologically dogmatic legal thinker than Robert Bork? I can't either. Nor, by the way, do I think he can lay claim to "remaining faithful to the text of the Constitution" when he essentially ignores the 9th amendment entirely in his legal theory. As Glenn Reynolds, the infamous Instapundit, put it:

...if you believe in following the Framers' intentions, and if the Framers clearly believed in unenumerated rights, then you can't dismiss the Ninth Amendment as a mere "inkblot," as Bork did in his confirmation hearings.

I've written much the same thing here. And this is a problem that is not unique to Bork, it is common among conservatives legal scholars and judges. As Jeff Cooper pointed out in a post concerning Glenn's views on the subject, Scalia has the same problem in his writings and opinions concerning the 9th amendment:

Justice Scalia, in other words, refuses to take seriously the Ninth Amendment's recognition of unenumerated rights, and in doing so he does (in both the amendment's and Glenn's terms) "deny or disparage" those rights (to say that the rights exist but are not judicially enforceable is certainly to disparage those rights in comparison with enumerated rights). And in reaching this conclusion Justice Scalia is, in my view, unfaithful to his own proclaimed methodology.

I agree with both Glenn and Jeff that Bork is an "intellectually dishonest strict constructionist". He will gladly ignore an important part of the text of the constitution in order to reach the result that his largely authoritarian ideology demands.

Follow up: For a good discussion of the 9th amendment, see this article on Kyle Still's blog, which I just discovered tonight. Even though he's a Tar Heel (Go Blue Devils!), I really like his blog. Any page that combines constitutional law with reports on ACC basketball gets my immediate attention.