Richard Posner

"Judge Richard Posner is one of the great legal minds of our age, on par with such generation-defining judges as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Learned Hand, and Henry Friendly. A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the principal champion of the enormously influential law and economics movement, Posner is also an archetypal public intellectual: he writes provocative best-selling books, receives frequent media attention, and often engages in high-profile policy debates. He is also a member of an increasingly rare breed--judges who write their own opinions rather than delegating the work to clerks. We therefore have unusually direct access to the workings of his mind and judicial philosophy. In the first full-length biographical treatment of Richard Posner, William Domnarski examines the life experience, personality, academic career, jurisprudence, and professional relationships of his subject with depth and clarity. The book benefits from Domnarski's access to Posner himself and to Posner's extensive archive at the University of Chicago. In addition, Domnarski interviewed and corresponded with more than two hundred people Posner has known, worked with, or gone to school with over the course of his career, from grade school to the present day. They include his fellow former members of the Harvard Law Review, colleagues at the University of Chicago, former law clerks over Posner's more than thirty years on the United States Court of Appeals. Accessible and authoritative, Richard Posner is also a fascinating intellectual biography of a unique judge who, despite never having sat on the Supreme Court, has nevertheless dominated the way law is understood in contemporary America"--