Richard A. Posner (1939-2026)

Dick Posner, a giant of law and economics died on Tuesday, at the age of 87.

Here's the brief announcement from U. Chicago:

Law School Mourns the Passing of Richard A. Posner, Senior Lecturer, Law and Economics Pioneer, and Former Federal Appellate Judge 

"Senior Lecturer Richard Allen Posner, a longtime University of Chicago Law School scholar, former federal appellate judge, and pioneer in the field of law and economics, died on November 10. He was 87.  

Posner, who joined the Law School faculty in 1969 and spent 36 years as a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, is widely considered to be the most influential legal scholar of all time and, during his time on the bench, was considered to be among the most powerful jurists outside the Supreme Court. He authored thousands of court opinions, hundreds of academic articles, and dozens of books, and was a leading scholar of law and economics, a field born and developed at the University of Chicago beginning in the early 20th century. " 

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Here's a longer obit from the Washington Post:

Richard Posner, influential and iconoclastic federal judge, dies at 87
He served nearly 36 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago and was ranked by many as second in influence only to members of the Supreme Court. By Paul W. Valentine

"Before he became a judge, Mr. Posner ran a litigation consulting firm where he helped pioneer the concept of applying economic analysis to legal issues. He developed his approach more fully in his book “Economic Analysis of Law” (1973), now a classic text, contending that the economic consequences of laws should be considered in all aspects of the legal system. He once proposed abolishing adoption agencies to stop black-market adoptions and allowing pregnant women to sell unwanted babies on the open market.

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"He evolved from his economic cost-benefit pragmatism early in his career to advocacy later of more liberal positions on such issues as workplace discrimination, voter ID laws, same-sex marriage and physician-assisted suicide for the elderly.

"He favored legalizing marijuana but questioned animal rights. “It is wrong to give as much weight to a dog’s pain as to an infant’s pain,” he argued in a debate with animal rights advocate Peter Singer in 2001. 

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"Mr. Posner later distanced himself from many of his more provocative pronouncements and, in an unusual gesture by a federal judge, questioned whether he had ruled correctly on a major national issue: voter identification laws.

"After writing a majority opinion in 2007 upholding Indiana’s law requiring photo identification, he wrote in his book “Reflections on Judging” (2013) that the law is “now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention.”

"He went on to say in a clarifying article in the New Republic, also in 2013, that judges sometimes lack relevant “empirical data” to help decide specific cases, and for that reason “I may well have been wrong” in the Indiana voter ID case." 

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 With Chris Avery and Christine Jolls, I had the opportunity to coauthor two papers with Judge Posner, both concerning the matching market between appellate judges and law clerks (a market that is still in flux):

Avery, Christopher, Christine Jolls, Richard A. Posner, and Alvin E. Roth, “The Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks”, University of Chicago Law Review, 68, 3, Summer, 2001, 793-902. 

Avery, Christopher, Christine Jolls, Richard A. Posner, and Alvin E. Roth, “The New Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks”, University of Chicago Law Review, 74, Spring 2007, 447-486