Richard Posner, a federal judge who was the most-cited American legal scholar in history, died on Tuesday in Chicago. He was 87.
Posner served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago from 1981 to 2017 and wrote more than 3,300 judicial opinions during that time.
“Posner was the greatest and most skilled judge in American history,” Saul Levmore, a former dean of the University of Chicago Law School, told The New York Times. “Part of his influence was his willingness to think aloud, and in print, about what law may be trying to accomplish and how it might go about it.”
The law school called Posner a “pioneer in the field of law and economics,” who was “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.”
“As a judge, Posner was known as a tough and often unrelenting questioner and a staunch advocate for legal pragmatism,” the school said. “He disdained jargon-filled opinions.”
The chief judge of the Seventh Circuit from 1993 to 2000, Posner penned nearly 50 books on a range of subjects, including jurisprudence, antitrust law, economic analysis of law, national security and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Several of his works were critical of his fellow judges and the judicial system.
An appointee of President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, analysts said that Posner issued more liberal rulings toward the end of his career.
He was born in 1939 in New York City to Blanche and Max Posner. His mother’s side were Ashkenazi Jews from the Austrian Empire, and his father’s was of Romanian Jewish heritage.
Both of his parents were reportedly active in the Communist Party, and Posner was brought up in a secular environment, albeit with a bar mitzvah. He reportedly had a comfortable suburban upbringing after his father switched to a career in business.
Posner graduated from Yale University in 1959 and from Harvard Law School, where he served as law review president, in 1962.
He clerked for two years for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan before working for the Federal Trade Commission and for President Lyndon Johnson’s Task Force on Communications Policy.
He also assisted Thurgood Marshall, then U.S. solicitor general who later became a Supreme Court justice.
Posner moved to academia in 1968 and spent decades teaching torts, antitrust law and economic analysis of law, mainly at the University of Chicago Law School.
Posner and his wife, Charlene, have two sons, Kenneth and Eric, the latter of whom confirmed Posner’s death.
The New Yorker reported that Posner was “by a wide margin, the jurist most often cited in scholarly articles—cited almost as much as the next two.”
