Judge Posner’s Biography

Richard A. Posner was born on January 11, 1939, in New York City, and grew up in New York and its suburbs. He graduated from Yale College in 1959, summa cum laude, having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year; he was an English major and a Scholar of the House. He graduated first in his class from Harvard Law School in 1962, magna cum laude, and was President of the Harvard Law Review. He worked for several years in Washington during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations—as law clerk to Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., as an assistant to Commissioner Philip Elman of the Federal Trade Commission, as an assistant to the Solicitor General of the U.S., Thurgood Marshall, and as general counsel of President Johnson’s Task Force on Communications Policy.

Posner entered law teaching in 1968 at Stanford as an associate professor, and became professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School in 1969, where he remained (later as Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law) until his appointment to the Seventh Circuit in 1981. During this period Posner wrote a number of books (including Antitrust Law: An Economic Perspective, Economic Analysis of Law—now in its sixth edition—and The Economics of Justice) and many articles (a number of these in collaboration with the economist William Landes), mainly exploring the application of economics to a variety of legal subjects, including antitrust, public utility and common carrier regulation, torts, contracts, and procedure. He founded the Journal of Legal Studies, primarily to encourage economic analysis of law, and was a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He also engaged in private consulting and was from 1977 to 1981 the first president of Lexecon Inc., a firm made up of lawyers and economists that provides economic and legal research and support in antitrust, securities, and other litigation.

Posner became a Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in December 1981 and served as Chief Judge from 1993 to 2000. He has written almost 2200 published judicial opinions. He continues to teach part time at the University of Chicago Law School, where he is Senior Lecturer, and to write academic articles and books. He has written 38 books and more than 300 articles and book reviews. His academic work since his becoming a judge has included studies in the economics of criminal law, labor law, and intellectual property; in jurisprudence, law and literature, and the interpretation of constitutional and statutory texts; and in the economics of sexuality and of old age. His latest books are Reflections on Judging (2013), and The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice (2013) (coauthored with Lee Epstein and William M. Landes). His current academic research focuses on judicial behavior. Academic writings by Posner have been translated into French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek, Turkish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Slovenian. He and the economist Gary Becker write weekly commentaries on policy issues, published in “The Becker-Posner Blog,” http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner/.

Posner received honorary degrees of doctor of laws from Syracuse University in 1986, from Duquesne University in 1987, from Georgetown University in 1993, from Yale in 1996, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, from Northwestern University in 2002, from Aristotle University (in Thessaloniki) in 2002, and from Lake Forest College in 2012; and he received the degree of doctor honoris causa from the University of Ghent in 1995 and from the University of Athens in 2002, and an honorary juris doctor degree from Brooklyn Law 5 5 School in 2000. In 1994 he received the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Award in Law from the University of Virginia. In 1998 he was awarded the Marshall-Wythe Medallion by the College of William and Mary, and he received the 2003 Research Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation. He received the John Sherman Award from the U.S. Department of Justice in 2003, for contributions to antitrust policy. In 2005 he received the Learned Hand Medal for Exellence in Federal Jurisprudence from the Federal Bar Council, the Thomas C. Schelling Award for scholarly contributions that have had an impact on public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and the Henry J. Friendly Medal from the American Law Institute. In 2010 he received the first Ronald H. Coase Medal, awarded by the American Law and Economics Association. In 2012 he received the William L. Prosser Award from the AALS Torts and Compensation Systems Section, for academic and judicial contributions to tort law and the Duquesne University Law School Dr. John and Liz Murray Award for Excellence in Scholarship. His most recent award was the 2014 Howard B. Eisenberg Prize awarded by the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers.

Posner is a member of the American Law Institute, the Mont Pèlerin Society, and the Century Association, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Bencher of the Inner Temple, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, an honorary fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers, a member of the editorial board of the European Journal of Law and Economics, and a Consultant to the Library of America, as well as a member of the American Economic Association and the American Law and Economics Association (of which he was President in 1995–1996). He was the honorary President of the Bentham Club of University College, London, for 1998. With Orley Ashenfelter, he edited the American Law and Economics Review, the journal of the American Law and Economics Association, from its founding in 1998 to 2005.

Posner is married to the former Charlene Horn and they have two sons, Kenneth and Eric, and four grandchildren.

To see Judge Posner’s CV, click here