Richard Posner, the Judge

Volumes have been written, and more volumes will be written, about Richard Posner, the legal scholar and thinker. About his development of the economic analysis of law, surely the most influential school of legal thought to have arisen in the second half of the last century. About his commitment to pragmatism as an approach to law and how that commitment relates to and intersects with his attachment to economic thinking. About his belief in liberalism (in the classical rather than the contemporary political sense) and how this set of convictions informs his jurisprudence. Richard Posner is the most important legal thinker of our time, and for generations to come legal scholars will dissect and analyze, will praise and criticize, his distinctive legal vision. The volume you are holding in your hands does something different. For Richard Posner, of course, is not only a theorist. He is also a practitioner--a federal appellate judge sitting on the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. This past year, he celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary on that bench. And to mark the occasion, two great law schools that like to boast of their affiliation with Judge Posner--Harvard, where he studied (and, indeed, served as President of this Law Review), and the University of Chicago, where he has taught--decided to collaborate on a set of essays focusing on this more applied, and somewhat less examined, aspect of his legal career. (The essays by the University of Chicago professors will be published in a forthcoming issue of their school's law review.) The plan, devised by Dean Saul Levmore, was to ask faculty members, of many different perspectives and methodological commitments, each to choose and comment on a single judicial opinion authored by Judge Posner. The hope was that this exercise--a collection of case comments, all with Judge Posner's judicial oeuvre as the focus--would provide a new angle of vision on this iconic figure, giving rise to new insights about his approach to law and, more broadly, about the relationship between theory and practice that he tries to navigate daily. Case comments, as readers of all law reviews know, can be deadly affairs. But not so here, as you will see. I am sure this has something to do with the comments' authors. But truth be told, I think it has more to do with the comments' subjects. Most case comments are boring because ... well, because most cases are boring or, more accurately, because the words judges write to resolve those cases are. But Judge Posner does not know how to write dull opinions. In part, this is a matter of style. …