File under hypocrite.
Judge Robert Bork filed a personal injury action and is seeking a million dollars in compensatory damages PLUS punitive damages from a fall at the Yale Club where he was scheduled to speak. The WSJ Law Blog noted the details:
According to the suit filed in federal court in Manhattan, the club failed to provide steps and a handrail to climb onto the dais. Bork fell backward as he was attempting to climb the dais, striking his leg on the stage and his head on a heat register, the suit says.
The actual complaint here. The ACSBlog quotes an article written by Bork in 2002:
Judge Bork has been a leading advocate of restricting plaintiffs’ ability to recover through tort law. In a 2002 article published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy–the official journal of the Federalist Society–Bork argued that frivolous claims and excessive punitive damage awards have caused the Constitution to evolve into a document which would allow Congress to enact tort reforms that would have been unconstitutional at the framing:
State tort law today is different in kind from the state tort law known to the generation of the Framers. The present tort system poses dangers to interstate commerce not unlike those faced under the Articles of Confederation. Even if Congress would not, in 1789, have had the power to displace state tort law, the nature of the problem has changed so dramatically as to bring the problem within the scope of the power granted to Congress. Accordingly, proposals, such as placing limits or caps on punitive damages, or eliminating joint or strict liability, which may once have been clearly understood as beyond Congress’s power, may now be constitutionally appropriate.
There is no truth to the rumor that the law offices of Jim Sokolove will represent judge Bork.
this sound?
I’d agree that if Bork is bigtime against the american sue-everybody-when-you-get-hurt culture, that it is hypocritical of him to sue Yale for falling down. (I don’t actually follow Bork so I’m going to take your word for it)
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I’d also say that if Yale as an institution tends to be pro-lawsuits or at least anti tort reform, that it is ironic that they are on the recieving end of such a suit.
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I’d also say that it is ironic that posters here would criticize someone for undertaking such a lawsuit if they themselves are anti tort reform. Hypocritical even.
Do you see anyone “criticizing” Bork for filing the lawsuit? I don’t. What I see is people finding it ironic, and painfully hypocritical, that one of the leading proponents of shutting down injured people’s ability to recover for their injuries got a boo-boo and filed a million-dollar lawsuit over it. I don’t see what the views on tort reform of the people who wrote, read, or commented on this post have to do with Bork’s obvious infidelity to his own loudly-proclaimed “principles” — for God’s sake, it was the Wall St. Journal, whose ed bd. is probably the country’s loudest pro-“tort reform” voice, that called the suit to the world’s attention.
is a strict constructionist, reactionary, Republican Conservative who slips and falls.
First off, since you didn’t specify which part of my comment you thought was foolish I’m going to assume it was the last paragraph.
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Secondly, you add to the irony when you follow a sentence claiming that no one here is criticizing Bork (arguably true up until that point!) with this:
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[i]…shutting down injured people’s ability to recover for their injuries got a boo-boo and filed a million-dollar lawsuit over it.[/i]
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I’m sorry, but that is a criticism. It mocks Bork’s fall and appears to want to shut down his ability to recover for his injuries (in spriit at least!). Don’t even deny it. So I was premature in saying that people here would criticize Bork for suing (in whatever form) but immediately afterwards you characterize his fall as a boo-boo and mock his lawsuit. Nice one.
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I agree, he shouldn’t sue. But then again I’m pro tort reform.
I don’t think it’s hypocritical of people who are against changing the current tort protections to point out that someone isn’t practicing what they preach. Does Bork have a right to sue? Yes. And if he does so after publicly stating that others should have that right removed, then Bork is a hypocrit.
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The people on this site would only be hypocritical if they said Bork has no right to sue because of his statements in the past. He has the right, and if he uses it he needs to change his tune or be rightly identified a hypocrit.
Maybe he wouldn’t have hurt his head. Then again, Bork has shown a remarkable inability to look out behind him when approaching high places, as his botched confirmation hearings demonstrated.
…Robert Bork was the Republican Party apparatchik who fired Archibald Cox during the Saturday Night Massacre, after Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus had the good grace and decency to resign rather than firing Cox themselves. It was the Saturday Night Massacre that brought down the Nixon presidency, in one of the most ignominious acts in American presidential history.
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If Bork was not able to ascend to the dais, he should have asked for assistance. As far as I’m concerned, his complaint falls on deaf ears.
Clinton has an anecdote where Prof. Bork offering up some reasoning for something, and Clinton raised his hand and said, “That’s a circular argument.”
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“Of course it is,” said Bork. “All the best arguments are.”