University of Richmond Law School Dean Rodney Smolla--himself a distinguished First Amendment scholar--has announced that Robert Bork will join the faculty (though doing, it appears, a minimal amount of actual teaching of law students). Bork is also on the law faculty at Ava Maria--the law school started by the right-wing founder of Domino's Pizza (how did that guy get so rich selling such bad pizza?)--and it's unclear whether the Richmond appointment changes that. (Side note: graduates of Ava Maria recently had the best performance on the Michigan Bar exam, beating out University of Michigan Law School graduates! Needless to say, the best Michigan Law grads do tend to go out-of-state, so this isn't quite as startling as it first seems.)
As a publicity stunt, appointing Bork clearly has much to commend it for a regional law school. As an academic move, it seems a bit harder to explain. Bork's last two books might be generously described as slightly unhinged polemics, with no discernible scholarly or analytical content. The last piece of significant scholarship Bork did was the 1978 book on The Antitrust Paradox, which itself, I am told by those in the field, is less an original piece of work than a synthesis of the law-and-economics critique of antitrust law (though the Bork book helped solidify the triumph of that critique). In constitutional law, he is well-known for the 1971 "Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems," which contained the memorable observation that, "Every clash between a minority claiming freedom and a majority claiming power to regulate involves a choice between the gratifications of the two groups. When the Constitution has not spoken, the Court will be able to find no scale, other than its own value preferences, upon which to weigh the respective claims to pleasure." The gratification theory of rights and freedom has not, it is fair to say, gotten a lot of play in political philosophy.
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