Wendell Bird and Robert Bork

Just noticed this article, about a month old now, about the ACSI lawsuit against the UC. It contains one statement that jumped out at me. Wendell Bird is the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the case. He's a young earth creationist who was affiliated with the Institute for Creation Research and who wrote the model policy that was later ruled out of public schools regarding creationism in public schools. Here's the statement:

In 1978, when he was a law student studying under Robert Bork -- whose rejected nomination to the Supreme Court was an early battle in the culture wars -- Bird published an influential article in the Yale Law Journal. In it, he laid out a strategy for using the courts to compel public schools to teach creationism alongside evolutionary theory.

His strategy failed, of course. He was the lead attorney for the state of Louisiana in Edwards v Aguillard, the case that ruled that creationism could not be taught in public schools in the United States. But I had no idea he had studied under Bork at Yale. Interesting coincidence.

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Did he learn anything from studying under Bork? How could we tell?

By Ed Darrell (not verified) on 19 Jan 2006 #permalink