MCLEAN, Va. - Robert H. Bork, whose failed 1980s nomination to the Supreme Court helped draw the modern boundaries of cultural fights over abortion, civil rights and other issues, has died. He was 85.
 
Son Robert H. Bork Jr. confirmed his father died Wednesday at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Va. The son said Bork died from complications of heart ailments.
 
Brilliant, blunt, and piercingly witty, Robert Heron Bork had a long career in politics and the law that took him from respected academic to a totem of conservative grievance.
 
Bork's drubbing during the 1987 Senate nomination hearings made him a hero to the right and a rallying cry for younger conservatives.
  
"Robert Bork was a giant, a brilliant and fearless legal scholar, and a gentleman whose incredible wit and erudition made him a wonderful Hudson colleague," said Kenneth Weinstein, head of the Washington think-tank Hudson Institute where Bork was a distinguished fellow.
 
Known before his Supreme Court nomination as one of the foremost national experts on antitrust law, Bork became much more widely known as a conservative cultural critic in the years that followed.
 
His 1996 book, "Slouching Towards toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline," was an acid indictment of what Bork viewed as the crumbling ethics of modern society and the morally bankrupt politics of the left.
 
Bork, known until his death as "Judge Bork," served a relatively short tenure on the bench. He was a federal judge on the nation's most prestigious appellate panel, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, from 1982 until 1988, when he resigned in the wake of the bitter Supreme Court nomination fight.
 
Earlier, Bork had been a private attorney, Yale Law School professor and a Republican political appointee. At Yale, two of his constitutional law students were Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham.
 
"I no longer say they were students," Bork joked long afterward. "I say they were in the room."
 
President Richard Nixon named Bork as solicitor general, the administration's advocate before the Supreme Court, in January, 1973.
 
Bork served as acting attorney general after Richardson's resignation, then returned to the solicitor general's job until 1977, far outlasting the Nixon administration.
 
Long mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee, Bork got his chance toward the end of Ronald Reagan's second term. He was nominated July 1, 1987, to fill the seat vacated by Justice Lewis F. Powell.
 
Nearly four months later the Senate voted 58-42 to defeat him, after the first national political and lobbying offensive mounted against a judicial nominee.