Richard Posner, viewed as one of the most influential judges outside the US Supreme Court, dies at 87

Judge Richard Posner, considered by some to be one of the nation’s most important judges and legal scholars, died Tuesday at 87, the University of Chicago Law School, where he had long been a professor and senior lecturer, confirmed.

Big picture view:

Born on Jan. 11, 1939, in New York City, he enrolled at Yale College at 16. He graduated summa cum laude in 1959, then graduated first in his class from Harvard Law School in 1962, magna cum laude, and served as president of the Harvard Law Review.

He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in 1969 and taught there for decades. 

In 1973, he published "Economic Analysis and Law," a book cementing him as a pioneer in examining legal rules through the lens of economic efficiency and incentives. 

President Ronald Reagan appointed Posner to the appeals court in 1981. He was chief judge of the court from 1993 to 2000 and retired from the bench in 2017. 

In his 36 years on the bench, he authored more than 3,000 opinions. 

What they're saying:

Law School Dean Adam Chilton, the Howard G. Krane Professor of Law, said there has never been a legal scholar "quite as prolific, influential, and endlessly curious as Dick Posner.

"He was a giant whose influence on our legal system, the field of law and economics, and on our law school cannot be overstated," he said. "As a law and economics scholar and torts professor, I doubt there has been a week that’s gone by since I started teaching at the Law School where I haven’t talked about one of Dick’s ideas or opinions."

Upon Posner's retirement in 2017, Steve Kurtz, one of Posner's students at law school, noted that some "called him a conservative with a libertarian bent."

"But truthfully, he doesn’t fit well into any camp. He supports a pragmatic approach to judging that has guaranteed attacks from both right and left," Kurtz said.

Dig deeper:

Posner was a sharp critic of "originalism," the dominant philosophy of the modern conservative legal movement, Reuters reported. The movement seeks to interpret the U.S. Constitution according to its original public meaning at the time it was drafted more than two centuries ago. 

He called the concept a "magnificent disguise" in 1990, saying it allowed the judge to "do the wildest things, all the while presenting himself as the passive agent of the sainted Founders." 

He criticized what he perceived as "incoherence" on the part of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, himself a leading proponent of originalism. When Scalia struck down a Washington, D.C., handgun ban in 2008, Posner accused him of abandoning the strict, text-based approach to interpreting the law. 

He would rule on a variety of topics including abortion and LGBTQ+ rights and liberal advocates would sometimes hail the conservative judge’s rulings. 

He addressed the perceived shift in a 2012 interview on NPR in which he said he had become "less conservative" since the Republican Party started "becoming goofy." 

In 2014, the year before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, he labeled as "totally implausible" the arguments that Wisconsin and Indiana offered when they defended their same-sex marriage bans. 

"Heterosexuals get drunk and pregnant, producing unwanted children; their reward ​is to be ⁠allowed to marry. Homosexual couples do not produce unwanted children; their reward is to be denied the right to marry. Go figure," Posner wrote.

He retired from the court in 2017, and court documents would later reveal that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease roughly six months before his retirement. 

He is survived by his wife, Charlene Horn, and their sons, Kenneth and Eric. 

 

U.S.