Another Tort Reformer Sues

In what seems to be a classic case of “do as I say, not as I do,” one-time U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork, an advocate for limiting the right of ordinary citizens to sue for damages, has settled a $1 million lawsuit Friday against the Yale Club of New York.
Bork sued in Manhattan federal court last year claiming he fell stepping onto a platform to speak. Bork’s lawsuit alleged he injured himself so badly at the June 2006 event that he needed surgery and was left with a limp. He faulted the club for not having stairs or a handrail leading up to the platform.
Lawyers for the Yale Club blamed Bork, saying any injuries he sustained were at least partially his fault for not recognizing potential risks, which the club said were “open, obvious and apparent.”
Bork served as a solicitor general and acting attorney general in the 1970s. As solicitor general in 1973, he fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox on orders of then-President Nixon.
From 1982 to 1988, he was a federal appeals judge in Washington. In 1987, the Senate denied President Reagan’s nomination of Bork for the Supreme Court.
Bork has long 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.”