Robert Bork, a conservative jurist and legal theorist whose failed 1987 nomination to the Supreme Court helped set the tone for contentious and partisan confirmation hearings, has died at age 85.  Mr. Bork's son, Robert H. Bork Jr., confirmed the death Wednesday.  At the time of his high-court nomination, Mr. Bork was no stranger to political controversy. He had earlier became perhaps the best-known Solicitor General in U.S. history when, as acting Attorney General in 1973, he fired Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox after Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus each resigned rather than carry out the firing that President Richard Nixon had ordered. The episode went down in history as the "Saturday Night Massacre," and Mr. Bork was criticized for bending to the president's will.  Judge Robert Bork, shown in 1987, was the subject of a partisan fight over his nomination to the Supreme Court.  Mr. Bork's searing 1987 confirmation hearings for a seat on the high court also served as a cautionary tale for future nominees, who became reluctant to share their legal opinions before lawmakers.  In the later part of his life, Mr. Bork expanded his purview into cultural criticism, arguing in "Slouching Towards Gomorrah" that liberalism was undermining Western civilization.  A self-described Constitutional "originalist" who was critical of judges who appealed to a right of privacy and other doctrines not explicitly written into the Constitution, Mr. Bork inspired intense emotions on both the political right and left. So stormy were his confirmation hearings that his name entered the English language as a byword for attacking a public figure in the media.  In November 1973, then-Acting Attorney General Robert H. Bork testified before the Senate on legislation providing for a court-appointed special Watergate prosecutor.  Nominated by President Reagan to fill the Supreme Court spot of the retiring centrist justice Lewis Powell, Mr. Bork became the object of opposition by liberals who feared, among other things, that he would tip the court's balance on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion. Mr. Bork had publicly condemned the decision as legally shoddy, and affirmed this view under Senate questioning.  Within an hour of his nomination in 1987, Sen. Edward Kennedy, paladin of the left, rose in the Senate to condemn Mr. Bork's jurisprudence.  "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution," Mr. Kennedy said. "The doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens."  The words rankled and Mr. Bork dismissed them, telling author Michael Kelly that "There was not a line in that speech that was accurate." But the speech set the tone for the hearings, the first ever televised for the high court, which ended in Mr. Bork's being rejected, 58 votes to 42.  Raised in Pittsburgh, Mr. Bork was the son of a steel-company executive and served in the Marines. He described himself as a schoolboy socialist, but by the time he completed his legal studies at the University of Chicago he was a committed laissez-faire conservative.  He specialized in antitrust law and was in private practice in Chicago for a decade before taking a substantial pay cut to take a teaching post at Yale University Law School in 1962.  Collaborating at times with Yale constitutional scholar Alexander Bickel, Mr. Bork developed a conservative judicial philosophy centered on what he took to be the original intent of the Constitution's framers.  In an influential 1971 Indiana Law Journal article, he assailed the high court's recognition of a right to privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut, contending that the court should recognize only rights clearly specified in the Constitution.  Among his other controversial holdings was that the first amendment applied only to political speech, and that Roe v. Wade was a usurpation of state's rights. It was that position, more than any other, that would galvanize opposition to his Supreme Court nomination.  Mr. Bork also published "The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War With Itself," an influential study that argued that consumer benefit should drive antitrust actions.  Mr. Bork drafted position papers for Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign in 1964 and Richard Nixon's 1968 and 1972 campaigns. In the early 1970s he emerged as the staunchest defender of Mr. Nixon's proposals to end busing students to achieve school integration, and by 1972 was mentioned on shortlists as a possible candidate should a seat on the Supreme Court come open.  Instead, Mr. Nixon appointed him solicitor general. Among Mr. Bork's first acts in office was to issue a brief that only the President—and not the Vice-President—was immune to criminal prosecution. The opinion helped the government bring charges of bribery, extortion, tax fraud and conspiracy against Vice-President Spiro Agnew, who subsequently resigned.  Weeks later came the "Saturday Night Massacre," when at the President's behest Mr. Bork fired Mr. Cox as Watergate special prosecutor. What is sometimes lost in the telling of that tale is that Mr. Bork insisted that the prosecutor's office staff be retained, that the investigation go forward, and that a new prosecutor be appointed. He appointed Leon Jaworski as the new special Watergate prosecutor on Nov. 1, 1973, the same day Mr. Nixon announced the nomination of Ohio Sen. William Saxbe as the new attorney general.  Mr. Bork stayed at Justice under the end of the Ford administration, then returned to Yale, where he remained for several years. In 1981, he returned to Washington, where he became a partner in a corporate law practice. Within months President Ronald Reagan's attorney general, William French Smith, appointed Mr. Bork to a position on the D.C. Court of Appeals, a traditional staging post for seats on the Supreme Court. His colleague on that bench, Antonin Scalia, was picked as a nominee in 1986.  In 1987 came Mr. Bork's turn, and the resulting brouhaha changed the nature of Supreme Court nominations. Mr. Bork, looking distinctly out of the ordinary with his rotund frame and scraggly red beard, barely tried to sugarcoat his contempt for judges who found new "rights" lurking in the Constitution. Meanwhile, critics vilified him and tried to dig up dirt by investigating such ephemera as his video rentals. (The leaked list contained mainly Hollywood classics; the leaking of the list help spur the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988, thus fulfilling Mr. Bork's contention that Americans enjoyed a right of privacy only as enumerated by specific legislation.)  Mr. Bork's partisan rejection seems to have embittered him, and he resigned from the appeals court in 1988 and devoted himself to writing books, two of which became bestsellers: "The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law" and "Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline."  Despite this dyspeptic public mien, Mr. Bork retained a certain zest, and once wrote to The Wall Street Journal to respond to a feature on the martini, "The correct response when offered an olive is, 'When I want a salad, I'll ask for it."  His wife died in 1980, and Mr. Bork remarried in 1982, wedding a former Catholic nun. In 2003, Mr. Bork converted to Catholicism, and credited his wife for inspiring him. Asked why he waited so long to convert, Mr. Bork told the National Catholic Reporter, "There is an advantage in waiting until you're 76 to be baptized, because you're forgiven all of your prior sins. Plus, at that age you're not likely to commit any really interesting or serious sins."  Write to Stephen Miller at stephen.miller@wsj.com
Robert H. Bork, whose failed 1980s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court helped draw the modern boundaries of cultural fights over abortion, civil rights and other issues, has died