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A Time to Speak: Selected Writings and Arguments, by Robert H. Bork

(ISI, 750 pp., $30)

THE title of this big book is taken from the passage in Ecclesiastes that says "to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven," including "a time to speak." Robert Bork, now 82, has been "speaking" at various times over the past half century. A Time to Speak is a collection of the best of what he has said. And it is an unusual collection. Among the "selected writings and arguments" are articles, both academic and popular, but there are also briefs filed in courts, transcripts of oral arguments before the Supreme Court, judicial opinions, and letters to the editor. Bork sees his books--on antitrust law, constitutional interpretation, cultural degradation, and international law--as primary, and this "body of shorter works" (it contains 62 of them) as augmenting and extending them. A Time to Speak does accomplish that end, but it will also serve as an introduction to a rising generation unfamiliar with his work.

Bork happens to be one of the great lawyers of the past half century. He was a law professor at Yale before serving as solicitor general in the Nixon administration. In 1981, President Reagan appointed him to the appeals court in Washington. In 1987, Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court. And while the Senate's rejection of his nomination may be all that many Americans know about him, Bork's influence on the law and in the ongoing debates about its interpretation is enormous.

The subject Bork specialized in when he began teaching at Yale, in 1962, was...

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