Richard Posner

He read English literature at Yale before he read a statute. Posner graduated summa cum laude in 1959, went to Harvard Law School, ran the Law Review, and finished first in his class in 1962. He clerked for Justice William J. Brennan Jr., then worked for a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission — an agency he later argued should be abolished — and after that in the Solicitor General's office under Thurgood Marshall. Teaching at Stanford in 1968, he fell in with the Chicago economists Aaron Director and George Stigler. In 1969 he moved to the University of Chicago Law School, and the movement that made his name got built there.

Economic Analysis of Law appeared in 1973 and put efficiency at the centre of legal reasoning — the most influential legal text of its generation, and the founding document of law and economics as a field. Reagan named him to the Seventh Circuit in 1981, where he sat for 35 years and served as chief judge from 1993 to 2000. The output has no parallel: around 40 books, more than 3,300 judicial opinions, and the standing, by common count, of the most-cited legal scholar of the 20th century. He wrote his own opinions. Clerks did not draft them.

The right claimed law and economics, and one of its founders kept moving. He called himself a pragmatist, not a conservative. In 2012 he said he had become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy. He wrote the 2014 opinion striking down Indiana's and Wisconsin's same-sex marriage bans as a tradition of hate, having argued in 1992 that such bans were rationally defensible. He upheld Indiana's voter ID law in 2007, then disavowed the ruling in 2013. By 2017 he was saying the Constitution's original meaning was largely beside the point in a modern case. The other direction: a 1978 paper with the economist Elisabeth Landes proposing a market in adoption rights. Critics read it as a proposal to sell children, a thing that cannot be priced without being degraded. He said it had been misread.

On September 1, 2017, he announced he was leaving the bench, effective the next day. He was 78 and had meant to sit until 80. The reason he gave was pro se litigants: appeals written by hand, screened by staff lawyers, dismissed on technicalities. He had asked to review those memos himself, and all 11 of his colleagues refused him. In 2018 he launched the Posner Center of Justice for Pro Se's, a free legal-help nonprofit. Its board dissolved it in July 2019, swamped by roughly 100 requests for every person on staff. His standing is unsettled, and it is worth saying so plainly. The scholarship is inescapable. The pragmatism is still called lawlessness.

Richard Posner's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Economic Analysis of Law book
  The founding text of the field, revised through nine editions 1973
• The Economics of Justice book
  Efficiency applied to privacy, primitive law and the distribution of wealth 1981
• The Problems of Jurisprudence book
  His case against legal formalism and for pragmatic judging 1990
• Sex and Reason book
  Argued here that bans on same-sex marriage were rationally defensible — a position he abandoned on the bench in 2014 1992
• A Failure of Capitalism book
  The 2008 crisis made him doubt the rational-choice model underlying his own theory 2009
• Reforming the Federal Judiciary book
  Self-published as he left the bench, criticising his own court's handling of litigants without lawyers 2017

• January 11, 1939 aged 0 Born in New York City Son of Max and Blanche Posner.
• 1959 aged ~20 Graduates from Yale summa cum laude in English literature
• 1962 aged ~23 Finishes first in his class at Harvard Law School He had been president of the Harvard Law Review.
• 1962 aged ~23 Begins a clerkship with Justice William J. Brennan Jr. Government work at the Federal Trade Commission and the Solicitor General's office followed.
• 1969 aged ~30 Joins the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School He founded The Journal of Legal Studies there in 1972.
• 1973 aged ~34 Publishes Economic Analysis of Law
• December 1, 1981 aged 42 Receives his commission on the Seventh Circuit Nominated by Ronald Reagan on October 27 and confirmed by the Senate on November 24.
• September 4, 2014 aged 75 Strikes down the Indiana and Wisconsin bans on same-sex marriage Writing for a unanimous panel, he called the bans a tradition of hate and savage discrimination.
• September 2, 2017 aged 78 Retires from the federal bench after 35 years He cited his colleagues' treatment of litigants who had no lawyer.

• William J. Brennan Jr. 1906–1997
  Influential justice who expanded civil liberties, equality doctrine, and application of the Bill of Rights to the states. clerked for
• Gary Becker 1930–2014
  Extended economic analysis to family — crime and discrimination — winning the 1992 Nobel Prize. co-wrote a blog with
• Milton Friedman 1912–2006
  Nobel Prize-winning economist whose free-market ideas profoundly influenced American economic policy. shared the Chicago school with
• Learned Hand 1872–1961
  Federal judge whose widely cited opinions on free speech, negligence, and judicial restraint profoundly influenced American law. influenced by
• Antonin Scalia 1936–2016
  Justice whose advocacy of originalism and textualism transformed American legal interpretation. opposed