58 Facts About Richard Posner

Richard Allen Posner is an American legal scholar who served as a federal appellate judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1981 to 2017.

Richard Posner is widely considered to be one of the most influential legal scholars in the United States.

Richard Posner is known for his scholarly range and for writing on topics outside of his primary field, law.

Richard Posner has generally been identified as being politically conservative; in recent years he has distanced himself from the positions of the Republican Party, authoring more liberal rulings involving same-sex marriage and abortion.

Richard Posner was born on January 11,1939, in New York City.

Richard Posner then attended Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review.

Richard Posner graduated in 1962 ranked first in his class with an LL.

Richard Posner then served as an attorney-advisor to Commissioner Philip Elman of the Federal Trade Commission ; he would later argue that the FTC ought to be abolished.

Richard Posner went on to work in the Office of the Solicitor General in the United States Department of Justice, under Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall.

In 1968, Richard Posner accepted a position teaching at Stanford Law School.

In 1969, Richard Posner moved to the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, where he remains a senior lecturer.

Richard Posner was a founding editor of The Journal of Legal Studies in 1972.

On October 27,1981, Richard Posner was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit vacated by Judge Philip Willis Tone.

Richard Posner was confirmed by the United States Senate on November 24,1981, and received his commission on December 1,1981.

Richard Posner served as Chief Judge of that court from 1993 to 2000 but remained a part-time professor at the University of Chicago.

Judge Richard Posner retired from the federal bench on September 2,2017.

Richard Posner stated that he had originally planned to retire at the age of 80, but instead retired at 78 due to disputes with other judges on the Seventh Circuit over treatment of pro se litigants.

Richard Posner is a pragmatist in philosophy and an economist in legal methodology.

Richard Posner has written many articles and books on a wide range of topics including law and economics, law and literature, the federal judiciary, moral theory, intellectual property, antitrust law, public intellectuals, and legal history.

Richard Posner is well known for writing on a wide variety of current events including the 2000 presidential election recount controversy, Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and his resulting impeachment procedure, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Richard Posner had a blog at The Atlantic, where he discussed the then-current Great Recession.

Richard Posner was mentioned in 2005 as a potential nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor because of his prominence as a scholar and an appellate judge.

However, in reaction to some of the perceived excesses of the late 1960s, Richard Posner developed a strongly conservative bent.

Richard Posner encountered Chicago School economists Aaron Director and George Stigler while a professor at Stanford.

Richard Posner summarized his views on law and economics in his 1973 book The Economic Analysis of Law.

Richard Posner has written several opinions sympathetic to abortion rights, including a decision that held that late term abortion was constitutionally protected in some circumstances.

In November 2015, Posner authored a decision in Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin v Schimel striking down regulations on abortion clinics in Wisconsin.

Richard Posner rejected the state's argument that the laws were written to protect the health of women and not to make abortion more difficult to obtain.

Richard Posner rejects an ethic of strong animal rights on pragmatic grounds.

Richard Posner recognizes the philosophical force of arguments for strong animal rights, but maintains that human intuition about the paramount value of human life makes it impossible to accommodate an ethic of strong animal rights.

Richard Posner, a self-avowed moral anti-realist, does not present his critique of strong animal rights as a deductive proof.

Richard Posner goes on to reason that granting human-like rights to animals is fraught with implications which could radically disrupt or devalue the rights of human beings.

Richard Posner alludes to Hitler's zoophilia as evidence that respect for animals and humaneness toward human beings are not necessarily associated.

Richard Posner engaged in a debate with the philosopher Peter Singer in 2001 at Slate magazine.

Richard Posner emphasizes the importance of facts over arguments in creating social change.

Richard Posner describes those needs as unrelated to practical legal activity but instead as social and political.

Richard Posner opposes the US "War on Drugs" and called it "quixotic".

Richard Posner argues that the cost of inventing must be compared to the cost of copying in order to determine the optimal patent protection for an inventor.

In September 2014, Posner authored the opinions in the consolidated cases of Wolf v Walker and Baskin v Bogan challenging Wisconsin and Indiana's state level same-sex marriage bans.

Richard Posner wrote the opinion for the unanimous panel, finding the laws unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause.

The Supreme Court then denied writ of certiorari and left Richard Posner's ruling to stand.

Richard Posner is one of the most prolific legal writers, through both the number and topical breadth of his opinions, to say nothing of his scholarly and popular writings.

Judge Richard Posner evidently writes the way other men breathe", though the economist describes the judge's grasp of economics as, "in some respects,.

In 1999, Richard Posner was welcomed as a private mediator among the parties involved in the Microsoft antitrust case.

In 1999, Richard Posner applied the lex loci delicti commissi rule on choice of law rather than the Restatement of Torts, Second when rejecting a claim by an Illinois dentist who slipped and fell in Acapulco, Mexico.

In 2003, Richard Posner affirmed a punitive damages award of 37.2 times the compensatory damages guests won from a bedbug infested Motel 6.

In 2003, Richard Posner found that co-workers who did not prevent a hypoglycemic diabetic's fatal attempt to drive himself home violated no duty to rescue.

In 1990, Richard Posner found that Delaware corporate law did not permit an airline's board from adopting a poison pill provision that encouraged its machinists to take strike action if its pilots' takeover attempt succeeded.

In 1991, Richard Posner held that good faith performance is a factual question of the defendant's state of mind that must be proven at trial.

In January 2001, Richard Posner loosened that consent decree to allow the Chicago Police Department to conduct counterterrorism operations.

In United States v Marshall, Posner dissented when Frank H Easterbrook, writing for the en banc circuit, held that the punishment for possession of LSD is determined by the weight of the carrier it is found within.

In 2000, Richard Posner found that partners at a big law firm could be considered employees with regard to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967.

Richard Posner found that secondary liability attaches to a file sharing service for contributory copyright infringement in In re Aimster Copyright Litigation.

Richard Posner's son Eric Posner is a prominent legal scholar and teaches at the University of Chicago Law School.

Richard Posner is a self-described "cat person" and is devoted to his Maine Coon, Pixie.

Richard Posner appeared with his previous cat, a Maine Coon named Dinah, in a photograph accompanying a lengthy profile in The New Yorker in 2001.

Richard Posner has been known to illustrate legal points in his opinions with elaborate cat-related metaphors and examples.

Richard Posner was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in early 2018, approximately six months after leaving the bench, and as of 2022 resides in a nursing facility.