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Features

February 2009

Robert H. Bork on law & life

by Andrew C. McCarthy

On the career of Judge Robert H. Bork and his latest book, A Time to Speak: Selected Writings and Arguments.

The most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.
—Anthony Kennedy

For Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing those words in 2003, there was no higher authority to cite. He was, after all, quoting himself. Eleven years earlier, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Kennedy had first promulgated this misty, monstrous ode to judicial oligarchy. Back then, our robed masters were groping to rationalize the “right” to abortion they’d woven from whole cloth a ...

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Andrew C. McCarthy is the author of the The Grand Jihad (Encounter).


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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 27 February 2009, on page 11

Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com

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