Richard Posner

Richard Allen Posner (born January 11, 1939) is a retired American federal judge and legal scholar. He served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1981 to 2017, after being appointed by President Ronald Reagan, and was the circuit’s chief judge from 1993 to 2000.

Before his judgeship, Posner taught law at the University of Chicago. According to The Journal of Legal Studies, he was the most-cited legal scholar of the 20th century, and as of 2021, he remains the most-cited American legal scholar ever. He is broadly regarded as one of the most influential legal minds in the country.

Posner is known for his wide-ranging scholarship, which extends well beyond law. His writings and books have tackled subjects like animal rights, feminism, drug prohibition, same-sex marriage, Keynesian economics, the intersection of law and literature, and academic moral philosophy.

He has authored nearly 40 books, including Economic Analysis of Law, The Economics of Justice, The Problems of Jurisprudence, Sex and Reason, Law, Pragmatism and Democracy, and The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy. While generally considered politically conservative, Posner later distanced himself from Republican Party positions, issuing more liberal rulings on same-sex marriage and abortion. In A Failure of Capitalism, he wrote that the 2008 financial crisis led him to question the rational-choice, laissez-faire economic model central to his law and economics theory.

Early life and education

Posner was born on January 11, 1939, in New York City, to Blanche (Hofrichter) and Max Posner. His father’s family was of Romanian Jewish descent; his mother’s family were Ashkenazi Jews from Galicia in the Austrian Empire. After high school, he studied English literature at Yale University, graduating in 1959 with a B.A., summa cum laude, and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He then attended Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review and graduated first in his class in 1962 with an LL.B., magna cum laude.

Legal career

Following law school, Posner clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. from 1962 to 1963. He then served as an attorney-advisor to Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Philip Elman; later, he argued the FTC should be abolished. He also worked in the Office of the Solicitor General under Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall.

In 1968, he began teaching at Stanford Law School, and in 1969, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School. He was a founding editor of The Journal of Legal Studies in 1972. On October 27, 1981, President Reagan nominated him to the Seventh Circuit seat vacated by Judge Philip Willis Tone.

The Senate confirmed him on November 24, 1981, and he received his commission on December 1, 1981. He served as chief judge from 1993 to 2000 while remaining a part-time senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. He retired from the bench on September 2, 2017, at age 78 instead of 80 as originally planned, citing disputes with other judges over the treatment of pro se litigants.

Philosophically a pragmatist and methodologically an economist, Posner has written extensively on law and economics, law and literature, the federal judiciary, moral theory, intellectual property, antitrust law, public intellectuals, and legal history. He has also written on current events, including the 2000 presidential election recount, Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and the resulting impeachment, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His analysis of the Lewinsky scandal cut across party and ideological lines.

The New York Times called him “one of the most important antitrust scholars of the past half-century.” In December 2004, he co-founded “The Becker-Posner Blog” with Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker; the blog ended shortly before Becker’s death in May 2014. He also blogged at The Atlantic about the Great Recession. In 2005, he was mentioned as a potential nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor, but Robert S. Boynton wrote in The Washington Post that Posner would likely never sit on the Supreme Court due to his “obvious brilliance” and occasionally “outrageous conclusions,” such as arguing that the rule of law is accidental and dispensable, that a free market for buying and selling children could improve outcomes over regulated adoption, and supporting the legalization of marijuana and LSD.

From November 24, 2014, to January 5, 2015, University of Washington Law Professor Ronald K. L. Collins conducted a series of twelve Q&A posts with Posner, titled “Posner on Posner,” on the Concurring Opinions blog. In his youth and during his 1960s clerkship with Justice Brennan, Posner was generally considered a liberal.