doc_text: Who is this man a multi-million dollar ad campaign and a senator from Massachusetts said would turn back the clock on civil rights to the days of segregated lunch counters?
  Who is this man who would want to reopen such old national wounds?
  Robert Bork was the young associate in a Chicago law firm who in 1957 demanded that the partners end their Jewish quota and hire Howard Krane.
  Mr. Krane is now a senior partner there, and told the Judiciary Committee that "Bob Bork is a person without prejudice against any group."
  U.S. Solicitor General Bork was quick to rescue Jewel Lafontant, the first black woman to be a deputy in that office, when she told him of her exclusion from meetings due to her sex.
  "The very next day was the beginning of my attending so many briefings," Ms. Lafontant told the senators, "I wondered to myself whether I had been wise in complaining."
  The deeds of Robert Bork in his personal life are matched by the words of his professional duties as appeals court judge and solicitor general.
  The evidence is that the distortions of Mr. Bork's civil-rights record are nothing more -- or less -- than a grotesque lie.
  --Record as Appeals Judge.
  Bork opponents have tried to substitute result-oriented statistics for careful analysis of his legal reasoning to impugn Judge Bork as anti-women, pro-business, etc.
  Yet even on the basis of the opposition's anti-intellectual methods, Judge Bork's civil-rights record is clear.
  In his five years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Judge Bork has heard eight cases involving the rights of minorities or women -- and ruled in their favor in seven.
  In no case did he render an opinion less sympathetic to minority or women's rights than the Supreme Court.
  Perhaps even more telling, his opinions are among the circuit's most notable civil-rights rulings.
  In this year's Emory v. Secretary of the Navy, Judge Bork ruled for a black Navy captain who wanted to sue the promotions board.
  The issue was whether the military branches are subject to judicial review where civil rights are at stake.
  Judge Bork held for the first time that federal courts can decide these cases.
  Also this year, in Doe v. Weinberger, Judge Bork held that a plaintiff fired from the National Security Agency due to his homosexuality was illegally denied a hearing.
  Judge Bork has written or joined several opinions protecting women's rights, especially at work: Laffey v. Northwest Airlines (1984) demanded that stewardesses get paid as much as male pursers for comparable work; Palmer v. Shultz (1987) held for women foreign service officers alleging discrimination by the State Department in assignments and promotions; and Ososky v. Wick (1983) reversed the lower court to bring women in the Foreign Service under Equal Pay Act protections.
  --Record as Solicitor General.
  When the critics ask, where was Robert Bork during the great civil-rights victories?
  the best answer is that he was standing in front of the Supreme Court making the winning arguments.
  Indeed, perhaps the best measure of Robert Bork's civil-rights record is his four years as the government's chief litigator.
  Solicitors general have great freedom to file briefs weighing the claims of private parties in cases where they are not required to act as the government's defense lawyer.
  Mr. Bork used his position to argue more pro-civil rights cases than any Supreme Court nominee since Thurgood Marshall.
  In 17 of the 19 cases, Solicitor General Bork argued for the civil rights plaintiff or minority interest; the NAACP Legal Defense Fund was on his side in nine of the 10 cases where both filed briefs.
  Indeed, perhaps the most lasting accomplishment of his solicitor generalship in the mid-1970s was building on the civil rights gains of the 1960s.
  He was ahead of the times in 1976 in Runyon v. McCrary.
  The issue was whether private schools can deny admission to blacks.
  This controversial case raised the conflict between the freedom of private groups to set their own rules and the public goal of non-discrimination.
  The civil-rights law, Solicitor General Bork said, "reaches the actions of private individuals not in any way facilitated by state law."
  The Supreme Court agreed, with Lewis Powell dissenting.
  In several cases, Solicitor General Bork took the controversial position that plaintiffs do not have to prove the defendant's discriminatory intent in order to win discrimination cases.
  Black workers brought the 1975 case of Albemarle Paper Co. v. Moody against their employer and their union.
  They argued that they had been locked into low-paying jobs by testing policies and union rules.
  Mr. Bork successfully argued that even if the employer didn't mean to discriminate against black workers, the mere existence of a discriminatory effect entitled the plaintiffs to back pay.
  Solicitor General Bork tried to take the law even further.
  In the 1977 case of Teamsters v. U.S., the Supreme Court refused to accept his argument that a wholly race-neutral seniority system is unlawful if it perpetuates discriminatory effects.
  Despite Judge Bork's record of public service to civil rights, Sen. Joseph Biden claimed that "throughout his career, Judge Bork has opposed virtually every civil rights advance."
  How can this be?
  The critics cite Mr. Bork's speculative academic writings -- yet distort even these: --Brown v. Board of Education.
  Whatever Sen. Biden was referring to, it couldn't have been the landmark Supreme Court case that desegregated the public schools and gave courage to a politically deadlocked Congress to act on civil rights.
  Judge Bork has said that by the 1954 Brown case, "it had become abundantly apparent through repeated litigation that separate was never equal."
  This isn't a recent conversion: In a 1968 Fortune article, he called the ruling "surely correct."
  In his 1971 Indiana Law Review article, then-Yale Prof. Bork said that the 14th Amendment "was intended to enforce a core idea of black equality against governmental discrimination."
  At a Federalist Society meeting this past January, Judge Bork defended Brown's reasoning against critics who insisted that the 14th Amendment was not intended to prohibit segregated schools.
  He said, "To have chosen separation rather than equality would have been to read the equal protection clause out of the Constitution."
  Judge Bork calls Brown "perhaps the greatest moral achievement of our constitutional law."
  --Public Accommodations.
  Much has been made of Mr. Bork's three-page article in The New Republic in 1963 making the libertarian case against government-coerced desegregation of private establishments.
  Unlike the segregationists, he was not motivated by a desire for racial separation.
  Indeed, he stipulated that "of the ugliness of racial discrimination there need be no argument."
  Instead, his purpose was to warn against the dangers of government intervention into private relations even for a cause as noble as desegregation.
  "It is sad to have to defend the principle of freedom in this context," he wrote, "but the task ought not to be left to those Southern politicians who only a short while ago were defending laws that enforced racial segregation."
  Robert Bork long ago rejected the extreme libertarian argument.
  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 "did an enormous amount to bring the country together and bring blacks into the mainstream," he said at his 1973 confirmation hearings as solicitor general.
  "That is the way I should have judged the statute in the first place instead of on these abstract libertarian principles."
  Does this sound like someone who would undo racial progress?
  --Voting Rights.
  Critics of Judge Bork make the startling claim that he favors poll taxes, the device once used to deny blacks their right to vote.
  Judge Bork told the Judiciary Committee that he has "no desire to bring poll taxes back into existence.
  I do not like them myself."
  He has criticized Harper v. Virginia Board of Education, the 1966 case that invalidated state poll taxes.
  But the case had nothing to do with race.
  The high court in Harper explicitly said that there was no evidence of any racially discriminatory application of the $1.50 poll tax.
  Judge Bork told the committee that if the tax had been "applied in a discriminatory fashion, it would have clearly been unconstitutional."
  Judge Bork's point was that if there is no racial discrimination, then there can be no equal-protection-clause justification to invalidate a state poll tax.
  The 24th Amendment, he noted, prohibited only federal poll taxes, intentionally leaving states free to assess such taxes if they chose.
  Judge Bork has said that a better ground for invalidating a poll tax would be if it were so high an amount that it interfered with the constitutional provision guaranteeing a republican form of government.
  Apart from Judge Bork's extraordinary civil-rights record, there is a strong argument that minorities above all others should demand judicial restraint and an honest reading of the Constitution and its civil rights amendments.
  If justices of the William Brennan variety can make the Constitution mean what they like it to mean, the Supreme Court becomes another branch of government subject to buffeting by public opinion.
  The history of activist judges until recently is a history of black oppression; justices in Plessey v. Ferguson (1896) ignored the text of the 14th Amendment to create separate but equal.
  Judges such as Robert Bork insist that the law adhere to the Constitution, preserving a text that protects minority rights that today could again lose popularvor.
  A reading of Judge Bork's voluminous cvil rights record leaves the inescapable conclusion that the partisan campaign against him was one of intentional distortion.
  If only the special interests had shown a fraction of the compassion for the truth as Robert Bork has shown for minorities.
  As it is, senators who take the time to review his record will find no honest argument that minorities or women have anything to fear from a Justice Bork.
  --- Mr. Crovitz is assistant editor of the Journal's editorial page.
summary_text: Distortions of Judge Bork's unambiguous civil-rights record are a lie.
  As an Appellate Judge for the District of Columbia, never did he render an opinion less sympathetic to minority or women's rights than the Supreme Court.
  Furthermore, his opinions are among the circuit's most notable rulings.
  As Solicitor General Bork argued more pro- civil rights cases than any Supreme Court nominee since Thurgood Marshall.
  The NAACP Legal Defense Fund supported him in 9 of the 10 cases where they both filed briefs.
  Yet, Senator Biden claims, "Throughout his career, Judge Bork has opposed virtually every civil rights advance."
  How can this be?