Richard Posner

Richard Allen Posner (born January 11, 1939, in New York City) is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He is one of the most influential legal theorists and a major voice in the law and economics movement, which he helped start while a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He currently serves as a lecturer at the Law School. Judge Posner is the greatest American jurist who never served on the Supreme Court.

Posner is the author of nearly 40 books on jurisprudence, legal philosophy, and several other topics, such as The Problems of Jurisprudence; Sex and Reason; Overcoming Law; Law, Pragmatism and Democracy; and The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory.

Posner graduated from Yale College and from Harvard Law School, where he was first in his class and president of the Harvard Law Review. In 1969, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, where he remains a senior lecturer and where his son Eric Posner is Professor. He was an editor of the Journal of Legal Studies in 1972. President Ronald Reagan appointed Posner to the Seventh Circuit in 1981. He served as Chief Judge of that court from 1993 to 2000.

Posner is an unusual combination of a pragmatist in philosophy, a classical liberal in politics, and an economist in legal methodology. A 2004 poll by Legal Affairs magazine named Posner as one of the top twenty legal thinkers in the U.S He is a prolific author of articles and books on a wide range of topics which include the 2000 presidential election recount controversy, President Bill Clinton's scandalous affair with Monica Lewinsky and his 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.

He famously opposed the right of privacy in 1981. He argued that the kinds of interests protected under privacy are not distinctive. He contended that privacy is protected in ways that are economically inefficient.

He wrote several opinions sympathetic to abortion rights, including a decision holding "partial-birth abortion" constitutionally protected in some circumstances.

He wrote favorably of efficient breach of contracts. Breach often leads to a worse result for society: if a seller breaches a contract to deliver building materials, the buyer's workers might go idle while the buyer looks for a replacement.