Richard Posner

Richard Allen Posner was born in 1939 and is an American legal scholar and retired United States circuit judge who served on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1981 to 2017, appointed by President Ronald Reagan and serving as the circuits chief judge from 1993 to 2000. A former law professor at the University of Chicago, he was identified by the Journal of Legal Studies as the most cited legal scholar of the twentieth century and, as of 2021, the most cited American legal scholar of all time. He is the author of nearly forty books on jurisprudence, law and economics, and antitrust law, including Economic Analysis of Law, The Economics of Justice and The Problems of Jurisprudence, and has also written on subjects outside law such as animal rights and academic moral philosophy. Generally identified as politically conservative for most of his career, he distanced himself from Republican Party positions toward the end of his time on the bench, authoring more liberal rulings on same sex marriage and abortion, and in his book A Failure of Capitalism he wrote that the 2008 financial crisis led him to question the rational choice, laissez faire economic model at the heart of his own law and economics theory.