Bork in 1995:
Our expensive, capricious and unpredictable civil justice systems present precisely the kind of conflicting and costly state regulation of commerce that the Commerce Clause was designed to solve. Lawsuits, verdicts, settlements and the insurance necessary to defend and indemnify against them, are driving up the cost of goods and services everywhere, and consumers are paying the bill. The litigation explosion has no respect for the state lines because commerce and insurance are now national. Interstate commerce and trade have become the principal victims of a runaway liability system.
Courts are now meccas for every conceivable unanswered grievance or perceived injury. Juries dispense lottery-like windfalls, attracting and rewarding imaginative claims and far-fetched legal theories. Today’s merchant enters the marketplace with trepidation – anticipating from the civil justice system the treatment that his ancestors experienced with the Barbary pirates.
Bork and Olson, Trial Lawyers and Other Closet Federalists, Wash. Times, March 9, 1995.
As I wrote in the comments to Eugene’s post below, I don’t think that someone with such views is in any way barred morally or otherwise from using the tort system to redress an injury, but as a prominent attorney himself, Bork could instruct his attorneys not to assert “far-fetched legal theories” (e.g., punitive damages for a routine negligence case), or to request a “lottery-like windfall” (over $1 million in damages).