Richard A Posner Popular Books

Richard A Posner Biography & Facts

Richard Allen Posner (; born January 11, 1939) is an American legal scholar who served as a federal appellate judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1981 to 2017. A senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Posner was identified by The Journal of Legal Studies as the most-cited legal scholar of the 20th century. As of 2021, he is also the most-cited legal scholar of all time. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential legal scholars in the United States. Posner is known for his scholarly range and for writing on topics outside of his primary field, law. In his various writings and books, he has addressed animal rights, feminism, drug prohibition, same-sex marriage, Keynesian economics, law and literature, and academic moral philosophy, among other subjects. Posner is the author of nearly 40 books on jurisprudence, economics, and several other topics, 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. Posner has generally been identified as being politically conservative; in recent years, however, he has distanced himself from the positions of the Republican Party, authoring more liberal rulings involving same-sex marriage and abortion. In A Failure of Capitalism, he writes that the 2008 financial crisis caused him to question the rational-choice, laissez-faire economic model that lies at the heart of his law and economics theory. Early life and education Posner was born on January 11, 1939, in New York City. His father's family were of Romanian Jewish descent, and his mother's family were Ashkenazi Jews from Galicia in the Austrian Empire. After high school, Posner 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. He graduated in 1962 ranked first in his class with an LL.B., magna cum laude. Legal career After law school, Posner clerked for Justice William J. Brennan Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1962 to 1963. He then served as an attorney-advisor to Commissioner Philip Elman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC); he would later argue that the FTC ought to be abolished. Posner went on to work in the Office of the Solicitor General in the United States Department of Justice, under Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall. In 1968, Posner accepted a position teaching at Stanford Law School. In 1969, Posner moved to the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, where he remains a senior lecturer. He was a founding editor of The Journal of Legal Studies in 1972. On October 27, 1981, Posner was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit vacated by Judge Philip Willis Tone. Posner was confirmed by the United States Senate on November 24, 1981, and received his commission on December 1, 1981. He served as Chief Judge of that court from 1993 to 2000 but remained a part-time professor at the University of Chicago. Judge Posner retired from the federal bench on September 2, 2017. Posner stated that he had originally planned to retire at the age of 80, but instead retired at 78 due to disputes with other judges on the Seventh Circuit over treatment of pro se litigants. Posner is a pragmatist in philosophy and an economist in legal methodology. He has written many articles and books on a wide range of topics including law and economics, law and literature, the federal judiciary, moral theory, intellectual property, antitrust law, public intellectuals, and legal history. He is also well known for writing on a wide variety of current events including the 2000 presidential election recount controversy, Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and his resulting impeachment procedure, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His analysis of the Lewinsky scandal cut across most party and ideological divisions. Posner's greatest influence is through his writings on law and economics; The New York Times called him "one of the most important antitrust scholars of the past half-century." In December 2004, Posner started a joint blog with Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker, titled simply "The Becker-Posner Blog". Both men contributed to the blog until shortly before Becker's death in May 2014, after which Posner announced that the blog was being discontinued. He also had a blog at The Atlantic, where he discussed the then-current Great Recession. Posner was mentioned in 2005 as a potential nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor because of his prominence as a scholar and an appellate judge. Robert S. Boynton wrote in The Washington Post that he believed Posner would never sit on the Supreme Court because despite his "obvious brilliance," he would be criticized for his occasionally "outrageous conclusions," such as his contention "that the rule of law is an accidental and dispensable element of legal ideology," his argument that buying and selling children on the free market would lead to better outcomes than the present situation, government-regulated adoption, and his support for the legalization of marijuana and LSD. Posner on Posner Series Judge Posner was the focus of a "series" of posts (many Q&A interviews with the Judge) done by University of Washington Law Professor Ronald K. L. Collins. The twelve posts—collectively titled "Posner on Posner"—began on November 24, 2014, and ended on January 5, 2015, and appeared on the Concurring Opinions blog. Legal and philosophical positions In Posner's youth and in the 1960s as law clerk to William J. Brennan, he was generally counted as a liberal. However, in reaction to some of the perceived excesses of the late 1960s, Posner developed a strongly conservative bent. He encountered Chicago School economists Aaron Director and George Stigler while a professor at Stanford. Posner summarized his views on law and economics in his 1973 book The Economic Analysis of Law. Today, although generally viewed as to the right in academia, Posner's pragmatism, his qualified moral relativism and moral skepticism, and his affection for the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche set him apart from most American conservatives. As a judge, with the exception of his rulings with respect to the sentencing guidelines and the recording of police actions, Posner's judicial votes have always placed him on the moderate-to-liberal wing of the Republican Party, where he has become more isolated over time. In July 2012, Posner stated, "I've become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy." Among Posner's judicial influences are the American jurists Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Learned Hand; he has written that "Holmes is the greatest jurist ... because the sum of his ideas, metaphors, decisions, dissents and other contribut.... Discover the Richard A Posner popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Richard A Posner books.