A Long and Winding Odyssey

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After two years, as other successful classmates were preparing to look for lucrative law-firm jobs, Bork unexpectedly went in the opposite direction. He re-enlisted in the Marines, this time as an officer, and trained as a tank commander. "I liked the discipline of the Marines, and though it may sound corny, I thought you should serve." He returned for his final year of law school in 1952. By that point he had made the first significant change in his political outlook: he considered himself no longer a socialist but a New Deal liberal. He distributed leaflets for Democrat Adlai Stevenson that year.

His next move to the right was far more dramatic. When he signed up for Levi's antitrust course, he found it was being co-taught by the Polish-born economist Aaron Director, a fervent opponent of Government interference in the marketplace. Director became the catalyst for what Bork has called a "religious conversion" to free-market, libertarian principles. For four days each week, Levi would explain the legal rationale for various antitrust decisions; then, on Fridays, Director would explain "that everything Levi had told us was nonsense," recalls UCLA Professor Wesley Liebeler, who also took the course. By using economic analysis, Director argued that the Government's antitrust policies did the exact opposite of their goal: they made markets less efficient and harmed consumers.

Bork became a self-proclaimed "janissary" to Director, a loyal soldier who became a fellow in Chicago's "law and economics" program, a bastion of probusiness research. With Director's coaching, Bork produced a scholarly paper debunking the supposed dangers of "vertical integration," in which companies buy up suppliers elsewhere in the production chain. "We determined that the practice wasn't monopolistic, as popularly believed then," Director recalls, "but merely more efficient." The article won Bork widespread notice, and later gained acceptance by conservative antitrust scholars and judges.

While a law student, Bork, a Protestant, met and courted a Chicago undergraduate named Claire Davidson, daughter of a New York Jewish family. Their subsequent marriage produced three children and a partnership of uncommon unity. Friends recall Claire as her husband's alter ego, his sounding board on virtually every matter, intellectual and practical. They once stayed up all night talking about antitrust theory. They spent many late nights discussing his desire to explore his libertarian ideas further, to test free- market theory against social issues far removed from the economy. It was with Claire's backing that Bork finally packed the Chevrolet to take an untenured position teaching antitrust law at Yale.

In New Haven, Bork struck up an odd-couple friendship with Alexander Bickel, perhaps the country's foremost constitutional scholar. Casting about for a second course to teach, Bork acted on Claire's advice and picked the "most exciting, dynamic and intellectual field," constitutional law. Bickel dropped in on Bork one day, and the two held an impromptu debate in front of a vastly amused class. That led to perhaps the most popular offering at Yale Law in the 1960s, a constitutional-theory seminar that the two men jointly taught in good-natured combative fashion.