Siegan Court Nomination Takes a Back Seat to Bork Hearings

The debate over the nomination of University of San Diego Prof. Bernard Siegan to a federal appeals court--already long delayed--seems likely to be sidetracked further as the Senate weighs Robert H. Bork’s possible promotion to the U.S. Supreme Court, a key Senate aide said Thursday.

A scheduled July 21 confirmation hearing for Siegan--a libertarian scholar whose views, like Bork’s, have drawn heavy fire from liberals--probably will be postponed, according to Steve Metalitz, an aide to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who heads a Democratic task force named to screen judicial nominees.

Even if the delay is brief, moreover, final Senate action on Siegan’s nomination to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is likely to be held up until after the Senate has acted on Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Metalitz said. The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing on Bork’s nomination for Sept. 15.

In the meantime, the broad coalition of liberal groups that has stalked Siegan since his nomination by President Reagan to the appeals court in early February now has largely turned its attention to combating Bork’s ascension from the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia.

Focus Is On Bork

“There’s so much to do on Bork at the moment that we have really focused on Bork,” said Nancy Broff, director of the Judicial Selection Project, a coalition of two dozen liberal and civil rights organizations that lobbies against conservative judicial nominations.

Broff said Thursday that the coalition members plan to fight both nominations. “We are all aware there are times you have to be able to fight on two fronts at once,” she said.

But while Broff insisted the groups have made no decisions about how to divide their limited resources between the two nomination battles, she acknowledged that plans to issue a lengthy report critiquing Siegan’s legal views have been indefinitely postponed.

Both Siegan and Bork are adherents to a school of constitutional interpretation that claims to regard the “original intent” of the Constitution’s authors as binding on judges.

Though they share common critics and are acquainted with one another--Bork last year inaugurated a lecture series at USD honoring Siegan’s late wife--they are not considered ideological clones by legal experts. Bork is widely regarded as more conventionally conservative, while Siegan is distinguished by his strongly libertarian views on economic and property rights.