Preface.

• Author: Porter, Robert R.

Few jurists or scholars have had as much influence over the shape of contemporary legal thinking as Robert Bork. More than any position he has occupied--including Yale Law School Professor, United States Solicitor General, Acting U.S. Attorney General, and Judge on the D.C. Circuit--his legacy lies in his ideas. The nine essays in this volume honoring his life and thought explore Judge Bork's intellectual contributions through the principles and arguments he developed in three landmark books.

Turning conventional wisdom on its head in The Antitrust Paradox, then-Professor Bork argued that antitrust law should focus on the protection of competition rather than competitors, with the maximization of consumer welfare as its guiding objective. In the three decades since the book's initial publication, Supreme Court decisions have in many respects remade antitrust jurisprudence according to Borkean principles, removing a variety of legal restrictions that had paradoxically protected inefficient competitors from competition. Essays by Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook, Judge Douglas Ginsburg, and Professor George Priest explore the considerable influence that Bork's writings have had in refining contemporary conceptions of exclusionary conduct, promoting an understanding of the Sherman Act as directed primarily to allocative efficiency, and distilling the economic teaching of the Chicago School into a single, workable standard for antitrust analysis.

Having identified the limited institutional competence of courts in the context of antitrust litigation, Judge Bork turned next to a more comprehensive assessment of the judicial role in the American political system. Much of the wide-ranging historical and theoretical analysis in The Tempting of America aimed at reconciling the "Madisonian dilemma" of instituting governance according to majoritarian democracy while simultaneously safeguarding individual and minority rights. The resulting theory of constitutional adjudication, grounded in neutral principles and original understanding, launched a vigorous academic debate and continues to influence leading jurists, political theorists, and legal historians. In essays considering various aspects of Judge Bork's judicial philosophy, Professors Kurt Lash, John Harrison, and Saikrishna Prakash examine the merits of originalism as an interpretive theory, the hypotheses that lie at its foundations, and its relation to popular sovereignty.

In Slouching Towards...