Robert Bork, Yale Law Professor, Opposes Civil Rights Bill
Yale Law Professor Robert Bork published an article in The New Republic on this day opposing the civil rights bill before Congress at the time. The bill became the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act, on July 2, 1964, one of the most important laws in American history.
The article, “Civil Rights – A Challenge,” came back to haunt him when he was nominated for the Supreme Court in 1987. Civil rights and civil liberties groups fiercely opposed his nomination because of his previous position on civil rights and his later positions on abortion and the right to privacy.
Bork’s article may have been more widely read in 1987 than when it was first published. The Senate rejected his nomination by a vote of 42 to 58 on October 23, 1987.
Watch a PBS news story on Bork’s Supreme Court nomination:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ffTtOMIJAkRead about the dramatic history of the 1964 Civil Rights Act: Todd Purdom, An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (2014)
Learn more, read Bork’s own account of his failed Supreme Court nomination: Robert Bork, The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law (1990)
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here