Robert Heron Bork (March 1, 1927 – December 19, 2012) was an American judge and legal scholar who advocated the judicial philosophy of originalism. Bork served as a Yale Law School professor, Solicitor General, Acting Attorney General, and a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court, but the U.S. Senate rejected his nomination.

Bork was acclaimed also as an antitrust scholar, where his once-idiosyncratic view that antitrust law should focus on maximizing consumer welfare has come to dominate American legal thinking on the subject.

Bork was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was Harry Philip Bork, Jr. (1897–1974), a steel company purchasing agent, and his mother was Elisabeth (née Kunkle; 1898–2004), a schoolteacher. His father was of German and Irish ancestry, while his mother was of Pennsylvania Dutch (German) descent. He was married to Claire Davidson from 1952 until 1980, when she died of cancer. They had a daughter, Ellen, and two sons, Robert and Charles. In 1982 he married Mary Ellen Pohl, a Catholic religious sister turned activist.

Bork attended the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut and earned bachelor's and law degrees from the University of Chicago. While pursuing his bachelor's degree he became a brother of the international social fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta. While pursuing his law degree he served on Law Review. At Chicago he was awarded a Phi Beta Kappa key with his law degree in 1953 and passed the bar in Illinois that same year. After a period of service in the United States Marine Corps, Bork began as a lawyer in private practice in 1954 at Willkie Farr & Gallagher in New York and then was a professor at Yale Law School from 1962 to 1975 and 1977 to 1981. Among his students during this time were Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Anita Hill, Robert Reich, Jerry Brown, John R. Bolton, Samuel Issacharoff, and Cynthia Estlund.

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