In an article for Fortune magazine in 1971, Professor Robert H. Bork of Yale Law School wrote that “the two fields that I know best, antitrust law and constitutional law, are in states of intellectual chaos.” Striking a theme he was to repeat often over the course of the next two decades, he remarked that law in general was a field of study that “possesses very little theory about itself.” Before he was finished, Bork was to supply a good deal of the theoretical groundwork for a coherent understanding of law and judging.

In that same year, Bork published an article …