doc_text: In choosing federal Judge Robert Bork for the Supreme Court, President Reagan has tapped a leading architect of conservative legal theory -- and has ensured a tough confirmation battle in the Senate.
  The selection of the 60-year-old Judge Bork to replace retiring Justice Lewis Powell gives the president his third Supreme Court appointment and by far his greatest opportunity to alter the court's direction.
  The high court, with Justice Powell often the swing vote, has been narrowly divided for a number of years on volatile social issues, including upholding abortion and affirmative action.
  But in Judge Bork, appointed by Mr. Reagan in 1982 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the president has picked a rare judicial -- rather than a political -- conservative, a judge committed to a narrow role for the courts rather than to the Reagan administration's political agenda.
  A scholar and formidable writer, the former Yale Law School professor has made his mark in antitrust law and a wide range of constitutional issues, urging judges to base their rulings on the intent of the framers of the Constitution.
  However, judicial conservatives most often tend to reach conclusions that support conservative political views.
  And liberal Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, fearful that Mr. Reagan's choice may upset the Supreme Court's moderate balance, have made clear they will fight any candidate whose views about the Constitution and the courts are too conservative.
  Yesterday, Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, a Judiciary Committee member, lost no time urging that Judge Bork should be defeated.
  "He stands for an extremist view of the Constitution and the role of the Supreme Court," Sen. Kennedy said.
  "No justice would be better than this injustice."
  President Reagan announced his choice yesterday afternoon in the White House press room, lavishing praise on the nominee's intellectual abilities.
  "Judge Bork, widely regarded as the most prominent and intellectually powerful advocate of judicial restraint, shares my views that judges' personal preferences and values should not be part of their constitutional interpretations," Mr. Reagan said.
  He described Judge Bork, who stood next to him without comment, as an "impressive legal mind" and "a premier constitutional authority."
  The announcement came just five days after Justice Powell announced his retirement, citing his health and the approach of his 80th birthday.
  From the outset, Judge Bork was the clear front-runner to fill the vacancy, being favored by Attorney General Edwin Meese and his aides.
  The only questions were whether to go with a younger conservative whose influence would last well into the next century and whether the strength of Judge Bork's conservative views would make his confirmation too difficult.
  While the White House put aside the age issue, the confirmation process is likely to be a contentious one, both in the 14-member Senate Judiciary Committee and on the Senate floor.
  But the expectation, even among some Democrats, is that Judge Bork will be approved.
  The initial skirmish is over when confirmation hearings will begin.
  Committee Democrats say they don't expect to start hearings until September, raising questions about whether Judge Bork would be approved by the Supreme Court's opening next Oct. 5.
  President Reagan urged the Senate "to expedite its consideration"; his aides will push for a July start, although they aren't sure they will succeed.
  The nomination presents a political problem for some Democrats.
  Judge Bork is a difficult target, since his intellectual prowess is widely respected in legal circles, even by those who disagree with him.
  Judiciary Chairman Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat, and Democratic Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois, both presidential candidates, must satisfy liberal civil-rights groups that are already gearing up to battle the nomination and at the same time must avoid embarrassing themselves by using specious arguments, especially if the fight against Judge Bork proves futile.
  The president's nominee to become the 104th justice is a bear of a man.
  At 6 feet, over 200 pounds and rotund, with hair like a scouring pad and a beard to match, he is an imposing figure, made more so by his deep baritone voice.
  An affable man, he occasionally grows impatient with lesser intellects and inefficiency.
  His wife, Mary Ellen, a former nun, has been a calming influence, friends say, although also a very conservative one.
  It is his second marriage.
  His first wife, Clare, died of cancer in 1980, and he remarried in October 1982.
  Judge Bork was at one time a cross-country skier and tennis player, and he recently resumed playing tennis out of apparent concern about his weight and general health.
  But friends say his pursuits tend more to the intellectual.
  He sometimes listens to books on tape while driving to work from his northwest Washington home, and while solicitor general in the Nixon administration, he pored over the New York Times crossword puzzle daily.
  He does enjoy a good party and has on occasion been the one to close the bar.
  At a solicitor general's office reunion in 1978, the dinner went some $250 over budget because Judge Bork kept the bar open well after the planned closing.
  He first caught the eye of the legal community writing about antitrust law as a Yale Law School professor in the 1960s.
  In 1971, he earned his reputation as an intellectual, conservative legal scholar with an article taking a narrow view of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech.
  In 1973, President Nixon tapped him to be solicitor general, the Justice Department official who represents the executive branch before the Supreme Court.
  It was as solicitor general that in October 1973 he fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, after Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Mr. Richardson's deputy, William Ruckelshaus, resigned rather than carry out President Nixon's order.
  Judge Bork returned to Yale from 1977 to 1981 when he practiced law for a year before he was nominated for the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.
  Mr. Richardson, now a Washington lawyer, defends Mr. Bork's actions.
  Mr. Richardson says Mr. Bork considered resigning but that he urged him to remain for the stability of the Justice Department.
  Nevertheless, Sen. Kennedy yesterday suggested that the "Saturday Night Massacre" will be an issue, saying the president "should not be able to reach out of the muck of Irangate {and} reach into the muck of Watergate" for a Supreme Court nominee.
  But it is Judge Bork's prolific and forceful writings as a law professor and judge that have earned him his reputation as an intellectual leader of conservative legal thought for a generation of law school graduates.
  And it is those views that will be scrutinized closely by the Senate.
  "Unless Judge Bork can demonstrate to me that he comes to the court with an open mind, I would have some difficulty," said Sen. Biden at a press conference yesterday in Houston.
  Many civil rights and women's groups reacted quickly against the nomination.
  "There is tremendous potential for rolling back the gains we have made in civil rights and civil liberties over the past 30 years," said Judith Lichtman, executive director of the Women's Legal Defense Fund.
  And the AFL-CIO urged senators to refrain from endorsing Judge Bork until they can carefully review his record.
  Once a New Deal liberal, Judge Bork became more conservative while at the University of Chicago.
  There he studied economics under Aaron Director, a pioneer in applying economic logic to challenge a variety of theories and liberal beliefs.
  In 1963, he wrote an article in the New Republic magazine challenging part of the proposed 1964 Civil Rights Act that would require desegregation of private facilities serving the public, such as lunch counters and hotels.
  The law would impose the majority's morality on the minority, he said.
  But in 1973, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee he had abandoned his view and fully supported the civil-rights law.
  In 1968, in a Fortune magazine article, he was strongly critical of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, saying it "is in the process of descending in national estimation from a position above the battle to the status of a political institution."
  The justices, he said, "decide cases not according to the criteria they cite but according to their social and political sympathies."
  In that article, he described a landmark 1965 opinion recognizing a right to privacy that entitled married couples to use contraceptives in their home as "shallow, murky and rhetorical" and "one more slogan that some justices will use . . .
  in the process of writing their own tastes into the law."
  It was that 1965 ruling that was the basis for the Supreme Court's 1973 decision recognizing a woman's right to an abortion, and Judge Bork's criticism of sexual privacy has caused alarm among women's groups over his nomination.
  Indeed, in a 1984 appeals-court ruling, he declined to extend the right of sexual privacy to homosexual conduct and criticized the Supreme Court's record on privacy.
  "If the revolution in sexual mores . . .
  is in fact ever to arrive," he wrote, "we think it must arrive through the moral choices of the people and their elected representatives, not through the judicial ukase of this court."
  But some friends and colleagues say his views don't mean that he would automatically vote to overrule the right to abortion.
  "He is a true judicial conservative," says Dennis Hutchinson, a University of Chicago law professor, "and that means judges are supposed to defer to the decisions of the legislature."
  Another hallmark of judicial conservatives is putting great weight on the importance of honoring precedents.
  In a 1985 interview with District Lawyer magazine, he explained that he is more likely to stick to precedents in constitutional cases if so much legislation and so many other decisions have relied on them that "they have become part of the structure of the nation."
  But he hasn't said how he would handle challenges to controversial precedents on which the Supreme Court is divided: abortion, affirmative action, school prayer and school busing, among others.
  Judge Bork has been widely and sharply critical of the Supreme Court's 1964 decision establishing the principle of "one person, one vote."
  His criticism is based largely on the view that it is purely a political issue that is best left to the legislatures to decide for themselves.
  Views he expressed in 1971 in a series of lectures at Indiana University Law School argued that the First Amendment protects only speech expressly about government and politics.
  But he has since modified his position, concluding "that many other forms of discourse, such as moral and scientific debate, are central to democratic government and deserve protection."
  He excluded obscene and pornographic material from the First Amendment altogether.
  As a judge, he has devoted much of his energy to questions of what are proper issues for courts to decide, taking a tough view on when a plaintiff has suffered sufficient injury to bring a lawsuit.
  In a 1985 opinion, he argued against including sexual harassment as a form of job discrimination that is barred by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
  But in two 1984 cases, he cast votes giving a moderate reading to the free-speech and free-press clauses of the First Amendment.
  In the antitrust field, he has argued long and effectively that the laws were only intended to regulate consumer welfare and weren't intended to protect smaller or less efficient companies from competition.
  As a result, he has often opposed government efforts to block mergers that created conglomerates.
  Those who know him expect he would be a powerful force at the Supreme Court, although he was sometimes slow and even bored with his work at the appeals court.
  He isn't the kind of judge who invests a lot of time trying to lobby others to join him, but he hopes to persuade them with the force of his opinions, associates say.
  If he gets to the Supreme Court, associates expect him to help form a strong conservative coalition.
  He is a good friend of President Reagan's last nominee, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist used to stay with Judge Bork on visits to Yale.
summary_text: President Reagan named Judge Robert Bork, 60, as his replacement to the Supreme Court for retiring Justice Powell.
  Bork faces a tough confirmation battle lead by liberal Senate Democrats.
  Bork, a Yale Law School Professor in the 60's was appointed solicitor general in 1973 by President Nixon and then to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1982 by Reagan.
  He earned a reputation as an intellectual leader of conservative legal thought through his prolific and forceful writings as a law professor and judge.
  He believes strongly in precedent and a narrow judicial interpretation of law.