People searching for “Justice Posner” are almost always looking for Richard Posner, who was a federal appeals judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1981 to 2017. The title trips readers up: in the federal system, “Justice” is reserved for members of the Supreme Court, so Posner was formally a Judge, not a Justice. He is widely considered the most influential federal appellate judge of his era and, according to a 2000 study by Yale Law School librarian Fred Shapiro, the most cited legal scholar of all time.
The Short Answer: Who He Is
Richard Allen Posner was born in New York City on January 11, 1939. He graduated from Yale College in 1959 and Harvard Law School in 1962, then clerked for Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr.1Federal Judicial Center. Posner, Richard Allen After a few years in government legal work and a year teaching at Stanford, he joined the University of Chicago Law School faculty in 1969 and stayed affiliated with the school for the rest of his career.2University of Chicago Law School. Richard A. Posner
President Ronald Reagan nominated him to the Seventh Circuit in October 1981, and the Senate confirmed him the following month.1Federal Judicial Center. Posner, Richard Allen That court hears federal appeals from Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Posner served as its Chief Judge from 1993 to 2000 and retired on September 2, 2017. Across 36 years on the bench he produced an estimated 3,300 judicial opinions, a pace almost no modern judge has matched.
Why His Name Keeps Coming Up: Law and Economics
Posner’s reputation rests less on any single ruling than on an entire school of thought he helped build. His 1973 textbook “Economic Analysis of Law,” now in its ninth edition, became the foundational text of the law and economics movement, which applies microeconomic reasoning to legal questions.3University of Chicago Law School. Fifty Years After Richard Posner’s Economic Analysis of Law The movement grew out of the broader Chicago school associated with economists like Gary Becker, Ronald Coase, and Milton Friedman.
The central idea is wealth maximization: legal rules should be judged by whether they increase the total social value of resources, not solely by whether they feel morally correct. Law in this view is a system of incentives that shapes how people actually behave, and efficiency becomes the yardstick.
The approach reaches well beyond commercial disputes. In tort law, Posner championed the Hand Formula, which compares the cost of taking precautions against the probability and severity of the resulting harm; failing to prevent an accident that was cheaper to prevent than to let happen is negligent. In criminal law, punishment is analyzed as deterrence, weighing the severity of the penalty against the odds of being caught. He even applied economic reasoning to family law, treating marriage and divorce as contractual arrangements in which the parties weigh costs and benefits.
How He Judged: Pragmatism
Posner also described himself as a pragmatist. He rejected both strict originalism and rigid formalism, arguing that judges should focus on the real-world consequences of their rulings rather than mechanically applying historical texts or technical rules. A pragmatic judge asks whether a decision produces a sensible result for the people involved, drawing on empirical data and social science rather than legal abstractions alone.
The most unusual feature of this stance was his willingness to say he had been wrong. Unlike most judges, who treat their published opinions as settled, Posner publicly revisited his own reasoning when he thought it had not held up, something that showed up vividly in his voter identification work.
Opinions He Is Best Known For
Three Seventh Circuit decisions capture the range of his influence.
Moore v. Madigan (2012)
Posner wrote the majority opinion striking down an Illinois law that broadly prohibited carrying firearms in public for self-defense. He reasoned that the Supreme Court’s recognition of a right to armed self-defense in District of Columbia v. Heller would be hollow if it stopped at the front door, and that the right to “bear” arms, as distinct from “keep” arms, implies a right to carry a loaded gun outside the home.4Justia Law. Moore v. Madigan, No. 12-1269 (7th Cir. 2012) The court stayed its order for 180 days to let Illinois draft new firearms rules. Illinois then became the last state in the country to adopt a concealed carry law.
Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (2007)
Posner wrote the Seventh Circuit opinion upholding Indiana’s law requiring government-issued photo identification to vote in person. He weighed the state’s interest in preventing voter fraud against the burden on voters and concluded that the burden was slight because most people already have the required documents.5Justia Law. Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 472 F.3d 949 (7th Cir. 2007) The Supreme Court affirmed the decision in 2008.
In his 2013 book “Reflections on Judging,” Posner effectively recanted. He wrote: “I plead guilty to having written the majority opinion upholding Indiana’s requirement that prospective voters prove their identity with a photo ID — a type of law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention.” He said he could not be confident the ruling was right, given how poorly judges understand the electoral process and the sharp criticism directed at the wave of similar laws that followed.
Baskin v. Bogan (2014)
Posner wrote a forceful opinion invalidating Indiana’s and Wisconsin’s bans on same-sex marriage. He dismantled the states’ primary justification, that marriage exists to channel procreative sex into stable environments, as “so full of holes that it cannot be taken seriously.” If children are better off with married parents, he reasoned, that is equally true whether the parents are biological or adoptive, straight or gay. He noted that both states allowed infertile heterosexual couples to marry and that the share of births to unmarried women had risen in both states despite the bans.6Justia Law. Baskin v. Bogan, No. 14-2386 (7th Cir. 2014) The opinion contributed to the groundswell of appellate rulings that preceded the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.
His Writing Off the Bench
Throughout his 36 years as a judge, Posner remained on the University of Chicago Law School faculty as a senior lecturer.2University of Chicago Law School. Richard A. Posner He authored more than 40 books and hundreds of articles covering antitrust, intellectual property, literary criticism, national security, and the economics of aging, among other subjects. After the September 11 attacks he wrote three books on intelligence reform. He also co-authored a long-running blog with Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker, which gave him a public visibility rare for a federal judge. The University of Chicago later established the Richard A. Posner Professorship in his honor.7University of Chicago Law School. UChicago Law Celebrates the Creation of the Inaugural Richard A. Posner Professorship
After the Court, and How He Is Remembered
After stepping down from the Seventh Circuit in September 2017, Posner said he intended to keep teaching and publishing with a focus on social justice reform, and he devoted particular attention to helping pro se litigants, people who represent themselves in court without a lawyer. He even filed appearances as pro bono counsel in appellate cases outside his former circuit.
His legacy is contested but large. Supporters credit him with building the intellectual infrastructure of an entire field and training a generation of lawyers to weigh costs and consequences alongside rights and duties. Critics argue his economic framework undervalued fairness, dignity, and distributional concerns that cannot be reduced to efficiency, and that his pragmatism was untethered to any fixed constitutional theory. Even detractors generally conceded that he was the most influential federal appellate judge of his era, and probably the most intellectually productive judge in American history.