Following the controversy over his nomination, Bork resigned from the bench and joined conservative think tanks including the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute. He wrote three bestselling books including the 1996 work "Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline."
Bork was married twice. He was married to his first wife, the former Claire Davidson, for almost 30 years before her death in 1980. In 1982 he married Mary Ellen Pohl, a former Catholic nun.
Bork, a former atheist who had been raised Presbyterian, converted to Catholicism in 2003 at the age of 76. Monsignor William Awalt baptized him at a Mass in the chapel of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C.
"There is an advantage in waiting until you're 76 to be baptized, because you're forgiven all of your prior sins. Plus, at that age you're not likely to commit any really interesting or serious sins," he told the National Catholic Register's Tim Drake in 2003.
He said that he found evidence of the existence of God "highly persuasive," such as the arguments appealing to the design of the universe and the biological cell.
He found the number of witnesses to Jesus Christ's Resurrection be "compelling" and considered the Resurrection to be "a solid historical fact." He said the Catholic Church is "the Church that Christ established" and though it is "always in trouble" it has "stayed more orthodox than almost any church I know of."
Bork also credited his wife Mary Ellen for helping encourage his conversion.
The judge was the first law professor named to Ave Maria School of Law and taught there for more than four years.
Milhizer said Bork was "someone who deeply believed in ideas" and who "fit very comfortably and very well at an orthodox Catholic law school."
The announcement of Bork as an Ave Maria School of Law faculty member helped attract "many outstanding students" and gave the school "instant credibility" among the Catholic legal education community and within the broader legal culture, Milhizer recalled.
Kevin J. Jones is a senior staff writer with Catholic News Agency. He was a recipient of a 2014 Catholic Relief Services' Egan Journalism Fellowship.