{"id":167313,"date":"2026-11-12T19:20:42","date_gmt":"2026-11-13T03:20:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/11\/12\/judge-richard-posner-the-model-of-a-scholarly-jurist-dies-at-87\/"},"modified":"2026-11-12T19:20:42","modified_gmt":"2026-11-13T03:20:42","slug":"judge-richard-posner-the-model-of-a-scholarly-jurist-dies-at-87","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/11\/12\/judge-richard-posner-the-model-of-a-scholarly-jurist-dies-at-87\/","title":{"rendered":"Judge Richard Posner, The Model Of A Scholarly Jurist, Dies At 87"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Posner wrote more than 3,300 opinions over nearly 36 years on the Seventh Circuit<\/a>. He also authored or co-authored over 50 books and published something like 900 journal articles. According to one accounting, Posner averaged 14.7 articles per year<\/a> over the course of 62 years. He\u2019s the most cited legal scholar of the latter half of the 20th century<\/a>. Judge Posner died this week in Chicago. He was 87.<\/p>\n

One could focus on all the absurd numbers Posner racked up throughout his career. As one of the leading lights of the Law and Economics philosophy, he\u2019d probably find it amusing to see tributes casting his legacy into something fixed and quantifiable. Yet, as the legal community honors Posner\u2019s memory, the outpour of personal and professional anecdotes highlights the limits of a philosophy seeking to turn the world into a series of ticks on a ledger. <\/p>\n

Our founding editor, David Lat, put it simply<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I am so, so sorry to learn of the death of Judge Richard Posner. I was honored to call him a friend.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Above the Law<\/em> and Judge Posner enjoyed a long and delightful relationship. Lat once asked, not entirely joking<\/a>, whether Posner was the Beyonc\u00e9 of the federal bench. Posner responded to the suggestion that \u201cI am so pleased to be classified as a mono-monikered visionary.\u201d He gave us interviews<\/a>, benchslaps<\/a> to write up, and a cat to run for president. Not sure that last one was constitutional. On the other hand, neither is running for a third term, and no one seems prepared to put a stop to that right now<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I never spoke with Judge Posner myself, but that doesn\u2019t mean I didn\u2019t hear from him from time to time. Over the years, word would filter back to me through people relaying what Posner had thought about some story or other that I\u2019d written. Thankfully, it was mostly positive because there\u2019s a certain nightmarish stress in knowing you\u2019re getting graded by Richard Posner for a seminar you didn\u2019t know you\u2019d enrolled in.<\/p>\n

Posner didn\u2019t invent the idea of marrying economics and the law, but he did more than anyone else to shape the philosophy and put it into practice. His Economic Analysis of Law<\/em> came out in 1973, and law students have been forced to grapple with numbers ever since. The Anglo-American legal tradition ran on vibes for centuries until Posner literally wrote the book (books?) pointing out that every doctrine had a price, every rule was an incentive, and every 1L who went law school because they were bad at math hit a brick wall in Torts.<\/p>\n

As a scholar, Posner found a way to explain all manner of legal issues as rooted in economics. He and Elisabeth Landes wrote The Economics of the Baby Shortage<\/em><\/a>, arguing that adoption regulation created a troubling black market by keeping a free market from balancing supply and demand. In Sex and Reason<\/em><\/a>, he outlined a rational-choice account of human sexuality. He wrote economic analyses of Good Samaritans, aging, and the market for federal law clerks.<\/p>\n

The baby paper alone has launched a thousand faculty lounge arguments about whether it was brilliant or monstrous. Posner embraced the \u201cmonster<\/a>\u201d label, because he thought the two descriptors tend, historically, to be a package deal.<\/p>\n

For better or worse, Law and Economics is everywhere now. From antitrust to contracts to regulatory review, the language of efficiency dominates the conversation. Unfortunately, like any philosophy, it has gone in some disturbing directions. Everyone paying 1000 percent service charges on tickets has reason to be annoyed by the shift in antitrust law toward efficiency at all costs. Even more diabolical is the punitive-minded hijacking of Law and Economics to argue that throwing a lookout in prison and throwing away the key is good actually<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Posner didn\u2019t take a zealot\u2019s approach to the philosophy, though. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, he wrote a book called A Failure of Capitalism<\/a><\/em>. Getting locked into dogma would betray his fundamentally scholarly approach.<\/p>\n

He carried that approach to the bench, where he also refused to stay in whatever box anyone built for him.<\/p>\n

Ronald Reagan put him on the Seventh Circuit in 1981. As the conservative legal movement began its decades-long takeover of the federal judiciary, Posner embraced heterodoxy. He tore apart Indiana and Wisconsin\u2019s same-sex marriage bans, first at oral argument<\/a> and then in an opinion that Slate\u2019s Mark Joseph Stern described as \u201ca witty, deeply moral masterpiece<\/a>.\u201d Posner penned a scathing takedown<\/a> of the Supreme Court\u2019s conservatives and feuded publicly with Justice Scalia, in a fight that got ugly enough that Scalia accused him of lying<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Posner told an interviewer in 2013<\/a> that he had no desire to join a Supreme Court that \u201cisn\u2019t a real court.\u201d Looking at the bench right now, Posner seems downright prophetic.<\/p>\n

Gus Hurwitz, Senior Fellow and Academic Director of the UPenn Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, offered another humanizing tribute<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Lots to be said. He was a giant. A generous giant. A giant in whose shadow many of us toil and on whose shoulders we all stand.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ll never forget the Greenberg Seminar I took with him at Chicago, on Utopias and Dystopias. For one class we watched the Matrix and Brazil (and read some Baudrillard). The class turned into a bit of a debate between me and [Posner] over whether Brazil or The Matrix is the better film \u2014 he loved The Matrix and I love Brazil. I was really just trying to defend Brazil, not to argue its superiority to The Matrix. At least some people came away from that class thinking I had won the day.<\/p>\n

In any event, that was the highlight of my Chicago Law career, bar none.<\/p>\n

Not only was the man a legend. He was a goofball. And fun.<\/p>\n

Never forgotten, but, now, missed. RIP.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s a prophet of Chicago School economics and a Reagan appointee, assigning Terry Gilliam, the Wachowskis, and Jean Baudrillard. Compare that to what passes for Republican intellectual life in 2026. Just this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went on a rant about banning continental philosophy from the military<\/a>. Another mile marker in the Pentagon\u2019s war on intellectualism that has already barred service members from attending Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and other elite schools<\/a> and purged books from the service academies<\/a>. Meanwhile, the leading Reagan-era conservative mind was reading Baudrillard in his spare time.<\/p>\n

Posner\u2019s unwillingness to accept a dogmatic worldview also made him one of the most eloquent critics of originalism.<\/p>\n

In Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College<\/em>, the Seventh Circuit held that Title VII\u2019s ban on sex discrimination covers discrimination based on sexual orientation, Posner joined the en banc<\/em> majority, but wrote separately to lay out a more honest and moral philosophy of judicial interpretation. Objecting to the semantic games the majority required to get to its result, Posner admitted that the \u201coriginal meaning\u201d of the statute in 1964 would not have contemplated protecting LGBTQ rights:<\/p>\n

\n

Had I been asked then whether I had ever met a male homosexual, I would have answered: probably not; had I been asked whether I had ever met a lesbian I would have answered \u201conly in the pages of A la recherche du temps perdu.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But then he explained why no one should want a legal system that cares about that. His concurrence<\/a> lays out a theory of interpretation that gives an old text \u201ca meaning that infuses the statement with vitality and significance today.\u201d He dubbed it \u201cjudicial interpretive updating,\u201d and pointed out that everyone already does it \u2014 including the originalists who swear they don\u2019t \u2014 and said the judiciary would be better off embracing this unspoken approach. He included a jab at Heller<\/em> along the way:<\/p>\n

\n

Or how the Second Amendment, which as originally conceived and enacted was about arming the members of the state militias (now the National Guard), is today interpreted to confer gun rights on private citizens as well.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The right largely won the public relations war against the \u201cliving Constitution.\u201d Most of the left ran from it because they couldn\u2019t muster much of a defense beyond \u201cbecause we like the result.\u201d It took this Reagan-appointed judge to lay out an intellectual case for interpreting text \u2014 constitutionally or statutorily \u2014 as expressing values with meaning informed by the present.<\/p>\n

\n

an interpretation that cannot be imputed to the framers of the statute but that we are entitled to adopt in light of (to quote Holmes) \u201cwhat this country has become,\u201d or, in Blackstonian terminology, to embrace as a sensible deviation from the literal or original meaning of the statutory language.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Words may express value judgments and meanings that the framers couldn\u2019t have put in words themselves? Sounds like the sort of guy who reads continental philosophy. Understanding what a text means to the people living under it today isn\u2019t a corruption of the judicial role, it\u2019s the point<\/em> of the judicial role:<\/p>\n

\n

I would prefer to see us acknowledge openly that today we, who are judges rather than members of Congress, are imposing on a half-century-old statute a meaning of \u201csex discrimination\u201d that the Congress that enacted it would not have accepted\u2026 We should not leave the impression that we are merely the obedient servants of the 88th Congress (1963-1965), carrying out their wishes. We are not. We are taking advantage of what the last half century has taught.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Three years later, the Supreme Court reached the same result in Bostock v. Clayton County<\/em>, though Justice Gorsuch got there insisting he just reads the dictionary better than everyone else \u2014 precisely the pretense Posner refused to indulge. Ironically, the dissenters cited Posner\u2019s concurrence to call the majority opinion \u201ca pirate ship\u201d that \u201csails under a textualist flag.\u201d That sort of misses the point of Posner\u2019s concurrence, but then again, Posner once estimated that the test of the smartest person in the world would include, \u201cestimating the IQs of the Supreme Court Justices in the range 80 to 89.<\/a>\u201c<\/p>\n

When Posner retired abruptly in September 2017<\/a>, he explained that the principal reason was the federal courts\u2019 treatment of pro se<\/em> litigants. Most judges retire to golf. Posner retired to pick a fight on behalf of the people with the least power in the building.<\/p>\n

\u201cPosner was a great intellect and a great judge,\u201d David Boies told me. \u201cHe cared about the law, and he cared about justice. We always needed judges like him, but now more than ever.\u201d <\/p>\n

Posner took on the case<\/a> of William Bond, a pro se<\/em> litigant whose claim had been dismissed with hardly an explanation, and when the Fourth Circuit demanded that Posner and co-counsel Matthew Dowd sign their names to the brief, they did. When the Fourth Circuit kicked the case (in a remarkably lazy opinion)<\/a>, Boies joined the team to take it to the Supreme Court. A guy who started out representing himself ended up with the former chief judge of the Seventh Circuit and one of the most famous litigators in America on his cert<\/em> petition. Unfortunately, that luck didn\u2019t materialize into a grant. <\/p>\n

To Hurwitz\u2019s other observation, Posner was a goofball.<\/p>\n

By his own admission, Posner was \u201ca very big cat person.\u201d Back in 2001, he posed for The New Yorker<\/em> with his cat Dinah and announced that he had exactly the same personality as his cat, which he described as, among other things, \u201cplayful, but with a streak of cruelty.\u201d<\/a> Dinah\u2019s successor, Pixie, was a Maine Coon who became arguably the legal world\u2019s most famous pet and a frequent commenter on @Posner_Thoughts<\/a> \u2014 a hilarious account back when Twitter was good.<\/p>\n

In 2017\u2019s Eike v. Allergan<\/em>, a case about glaucoma eye drops, the longest paragraph was about cats<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

cats prefer to drink out of a fountain (where gravity works for them) rather than out of a bowl (where gravity works against them)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Cats\u2026 true believers in seeking out economic efficiencies.<\/p>\n

Above the Law<\/em>, via LawProfBlog and Professor Eric Segall, once floated Pixie for President<\/a>. When asked after his retirement whether Pixie might make a good Supreme Court pick, Posner shot that down<\/a>: \u201cNo. Pixie is going to be president.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sadly, Posner\u2019s bout with Alzheimer\u2019s had already taken him off the public stage before his death. Professor Orin Kerr wrote a poignant thread back when Posner\u2019s diagnosis first came to light:<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A good reminder not to hold back kindness until it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n

\u201cMore importantly, he was decent and loving and gentle,\u201d Professor Larry Lessig, who clerked for Posner, wrote of his old boss. \u201cHe did not deserve the quiet humility that he carried, always.\u201d Lessig included another personal story<\/a> about the judge\u2019s humor and grace. After writing some harsh critiques of an early draft of Sex and Reason<\/em>, Lessig faxed Posner to apologize for his tone. Posner swiftly replied, \u201cPlease. I am surrounded by sycophants. The last thing I need is one more.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Professor Jamal Greene of Columbia might have the most fitting encapsulation of Posner\u2019s career<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

It is perhaps the ultimate tribute that everyone in the legal academy, no matter their views, has strenuously disagreed with something Richard Posner has written, and still they read the next thing. May he rest in peace.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Dick Posner took big intellectual swings and made himself impossible to ignore. And he did it a lot. Not that he can be reduced to a pile of numbers. In fact, this post is approaching 2300 words and it still seems inadequate, but it\u2019s time to hit publish so it\u2019ll have to do its best to stand in for all that could be said. Presumably, Posner would\u2019ve passed along some edits.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post Judge Richard Posner, The Model Of A Scholarly Jurist, Dies At 87<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t(Photo by John Gress\/Corbis via Getty Images)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Richard Posner wrote more than 3,300 opinions over nearly 36 years on the Seventh Circuit<\/a>. He also authored or co-authored over 50 books and published something like 900 journal articles. According to one accounting, Posner averaged 14.7 articles per year<\/a> over the course of 62 years. He\u2019s the most cited legal scholar of the latter half of the 20th century<\/a>. Judge Posner died this week in Chicago. He was 87.<\/p>\n

One could focus on all the absurd numbers Posner racked up throughout his career. As one of the leading lights of the Law and Economics philosophy, he\u2019d probably find it amusing to see tributes casting his legacy into something fixed and quantifiable. Yet, as the legal community honors Posner\u2019s memory, the outpour of personal and professional anecdotes highlights the limits of a philosophy seeking to turn the world into a series of ticks on a ledger. <\/p>\n

Our founding editor, David Lat, put it simply<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I am so, so sorry to learn of the death of Judge Richard Posner. I was honored to call him a friend.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Above the Law<\/em> and Judge Posner enjoyed a long and delightful relationship. Lat once asked, not entirely joking<\/a>, whether Posner was the Beyonc\u00e9 of the federal bench. Posner responded to the suggestion that \u201cI am so pleased to be classified as a mono-monikered visionary.\u201d He gave us interviews<\/a>, benchslaps<\/a> to write up, and a cat to run for president. Not sure that last one was constitutional. On the other hand, neither is running for a third term, and no one seems prepared to put a stop to that right now<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I never spoke with Judge Posner myself, but that doesn\u2019t mean I didn\u2019t hear from him from time to time. Over the years, word would filter back to me through people relaying what Posner had thought about some story or other that I\u2019d written. Thankfully, it was mostly positive because there\u2019s a certain nightmarish stress in knowing you\u2019re getting graded by Richard Posner for a seminar you didn\u2019t know you\u2019d enrolled in.<\/p>\n

Posner didn\u2019t invent the idea of marrying economics and the law, but he did more than anyone else to shape the philosophy and put it into practice. His Economic Analysis of Law<\/em> came out in 1973, and law students have been forced to grapple with numbers ever since. The Anglo-American legal tradition ran on vibes for centuries until Posner literally wrote the book (books?) pointing out that every doctrine had a price, every rule was an incentive, and every 1L who went law school because they were bad at math hit a brick wall in Torts.<\/p>\n

As a scholar, Posner found a way to explain all manner of legal issues as rooted in economics. He and Elisabeth Landes wrote The Economics of the Baby Shortage<\/em><\/a>, arguing that adoption regulation created a troubling black market by keeping a free market from balancing supply and demand. In Sex and Reason<\/em><\/a>, he outlined a rational-choice account of human sexuality. He wrote economic analyses of Good Samaritans, aging, and the market for federal law clerks.<\/p>\n

The baby paper alone has launched a thousand faculty lounge arguments about whether it was brilliant or monstrous. Posner embraced the \u201cmonster<\/a>\u201d label, because he thought the two descriptors tend, historically, to be a package deal.<\/p>\n

For better or worse, Law and Economics is everywhere now. From antitrust to contracts to regulatory review, the language of efficiency dominates the conversation. Unfortunately, like any philosophy, it has gone in some disturbing directions. Everyone paying 1000 percent service charges on tickets has reason to be annoyed by the shift in antitrust law toward efficiency at all costs. Even more diabolical is the punitive-minded hijacking of Law and Economics to argue that throwing a lookout in prison and throwing away the key is good actually<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Posner didn\u2019t take a zealot\u2019s approach to the philosophy, though. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, he wrote a book called A Failure of Capitalism<\/a><\/em>. Getting locked into dogma would betray his fundamentally scholarly approach.<\/p>\n

He carried that approach to the bench, where he also refused to stay in whatever box anyone built for him.<\/p>\n

Ronald Reagan put him on the Seventh Circuit in 1981. As the conservative legal movement began its decades-long takeover of the federal judiciary, Posner embraced heterodoxy. He tore apart Indiana and Wisconsin\u2019s same-sex marriage bans, first at oral argument<\/a> and then in an opinion that Slate\u2019s Mark Joseph Stern described as \u201ca witty, deeply moral masterpiece<\/a>.\u201d Posner penned a scathing takedown<\/a> of the Supreme Court\u2019s conservatives and feuded publicly with Justice Scalia, in a fight that got ugly enough that Scalia accused him of lying<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Posner told an interviewer in 2013<\/a> that he had no desire to join a Supreme Court that \u201cisn\u2019t a real court.\u201d Looking at the bench right now, Posner seems downright prophetic.<\/p>\n

Gus Hurwitz, Senior Fellow and Academic Director of the UPenn Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, offered another humanizing tribute<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Lots to be said. He was a giant. A generous giant. A giant in whose shadow many of us toil and on whose shoulders we all stand.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ll never forget the Greenberg Seminar I took with him at Chicago, on Utopias and Dystopias. For one class we watched the Matrix and Brazil (and read some Baudrillard). The class turned into a bit of a debate between me and [Posner] over whether Brazil or The Matrix is the better film \u2014 he loved The Matrix and I love Brazil. I was really just trying to defend Brazil, not to argue its superiority to The Matrix. At least some people came away from that class thinking I had won the day.<\/p>\n

In any event, that was the highlight of my Chicago Law career, bar none.<\/p>\n

Not only was the man a legend. He was a goofball. And fun.<\/p>\n

Never forgotten, but, now, missed. RIP.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s a prophet of Chicago School economics and a Reagan appointee, assigning Terry Gilliam, the Wachowskis, and Jean Baudrillard. Compare that to what passes for Republican intellectual life in 2026. Just this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went on a rant about banning continental philosophy from the military<\/a>. Another mile marker in the Pentagon\u2019s war on intellectualism that has already barred service members from attending Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and other elite schools<\/a> and purged books from the service academies<\/a>. Meanwhile, the leading Reagan-era conservative mind was reading Baudrillard in his spare time.<\/p>\n

Posner\u2019s unwillingness to accept a dogmatic worldview also made him one of the most eloquent critics of originalism.<\/p>\n

In Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College<\/em>, the Seventh Circuit held that Title VII\u2019s ban on sex discrimination covers discrimination based on sexual orientation, Posner joined the en banc<\/em> majority, but wrote separately to lay out a more honest and moral philosophy of judicial interpretation. Objecting to the semantic games the majority required to get to its result, Posner admitted that the \u201coriginal meaning\u201d of the statute in 1964 would not have contemplated protecting LGBTQ rights:<\/p>\n

\n

Had I been asked then whether I had ever met a male homosexual, I would have answered: probably not; had I been asked whether I had ever met a lesbian I would have answered \u201conly in the pages of A la recherche du temps perdu.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But then he explained why no one should want a legal system that cares about that. His concurrence<\/a> lays out a theory of interpretation that gives an old text \u201ca meaning that infuses the statement with vitality and significance today.\u201d He dubbed it \u201cjudicial interpretive updating,\u201d and pointed out that everyone already does it \u2014 including the originalists who swear they don\u2019t \u2014 and said the judiciary would be better off embracing this unspoken approach. He included a jab at Heller<\/em> along the way:<\/p>\n

\n

Or how the Second Amendment, which as originally conceived and enacted was about arming the members of the state militias (now the National Guard), is today interpreted to confer gun rights on private citizens as well.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The right largely won the public relations war against the \u201cliving Constitution.\u201d Most of the left ran from it because they couldn\u2019t muster much of a defense beyond \u201cbecause we like the result.\u201d It took this Reagan-appointed judge to lay out an intellectual case for interpreting text \u2014 constitutionally or statutorily \u2014 as expressing values with meaning informed by the present.<\/p>\n

\n

an interpretation that cannot be imputed to the framers of the statute but that we are entitled to adopt in light of (to quote Holmes) \u201cwhat this country has become,\u201d or, in Blackstonian terminology, to embrace as a sensible deviation from the literal or original meaning of the statutory language.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Words may express value judgments and meanings that the framers couldn\u2019t have put in words themselves? Sounds like the sort of guy who reads continental philosophy. Understanding what a text means to the people living under it today isn\u2019t a corruption of the judicial role, it\u2019s the point<\/em> of the judicial role:<\/p>\n

\n

I would prefer to see us acknowledge openly that today we, who are judges rather than members of Congress, are imposing on a half-century-old statute a meaning of \u201csex discrimination\u201d that the Congress that enacted it would not have accepted\u2026 We should not leave the impression that we are merely the obedient servants of the 88th Congress (1963-1965), carrying out their wishes. We are not. We are taking advantage of what the last half century has taught.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Three years later, the Supreme Court reached the same result in Bostock v. Clayton County<\/em>, though Justice Gorsuch got there insisting he just reads the dictionary better than everyone else \u2014 precisely the pretense Posner refused to indulge. Ironically, the dissenters cited Posner\u2019s concurrence to call the majority opinion \u201ca pirate ship\u201d that \u201csails under a textualist flag.\u201d That sort of misses the point of Posner\u2019s concurrence, but then again, Posner once estimated that the test of the smartest person in the world would include, \u201cestimating the IQs of the Supreme Court Justices in the range 80 to 89.<\/a>\u201c<\/p>\n

When Posner retired abruptly in September 2017<\/a>, he explained that the principal reason was the federal courts\u2019 treatment of pro se<\/em> litigants. Most judges retire to golf. Posner retired to pick a fight on behalf of the people with the least power in the building.<\/p>\n

\u201cPosner was a great intellect and a great judge,\u201d David Boies told me. \u201cHe cared about the law, and he cared about justice. We always needed judges like him, but now more than ever.\u201d <\/p>\n

Posner took on the case<\/a> of William Bond, a pro se<\/em> litigant whose claim had been dismissed with hardly an explanation, and when the Fourth Circuit demanded that Posner and co-counsel Matthew Dowd sign their names to the brief, they did. When the Fourth Circuit kicked the case (in a remarkably lazy opinion)<\/a>, Boies joined the team to take it to the Supreme Court. A guy who started out representing himself ended up with the former chief judge of the Seventh Circuit and one of the most famous litigators in America on his cert<\/em> petition. Unfortunately, that luck didn\u2019t materialize into a grant. <\/p>\n

To Hurwitz\u2019s other observation, Posner was a goofball.<\/p>\n

By his own admission, Posner was \u201ca very big cat person.\u201d Back in 2001, he posed for The New Yorker<\/em> with his cat Dinah and announced that he had exactly the same personality as his cat, which he described as, among other things, \u201cplayful, but with a streak of cruelty.\u201d<\/a> Dinah\u2019s successor, Pixie, was a Maine Coon who became arguably the legal world\u2019s most famous pet and a frequent commenter on @Posner_Thoughts<\/a> \u2014 a hilarious account back when Twitter was good.<\/p>\n

In 2017\u2019s Eike v. Allergan<\/em>, a case about glaucoma eye drops, the longest paragraph was about cats<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

cats prefer to drink out of a fountain (where gravity works for them) rather than out of a bowl (where gravity works against them)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Cats\u2026 true believers in seeking out economic efficiencies.<\/p>\n

Above the Law<\/em>, via LawProfBlog and Professor Eric Segall, once floated Pixie for President<\/a>. When asked after his retirement whether Pixie might make a good Supreme Court pick, Posner shot that down<\/a>: \u201cNo. Pixie is going to be president.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sadly, Posner\u2019s bout with Alzheimer\u2019s had already taken him off the public stage before his death. Professor Orin Kerr wrote a poignant thread back when Posner\u2019s diagnosis first came to light:<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A good reminder not to hold back kindness until it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n

\u201cMore importantly, he was decent and loving and gentle,\u201d Professor Larry Lessig, who clerked for Posner, wrote of his old boss. \u201cHe did not deserve the quiet humility that he carried, always.\u201d Lessig included another personal story<\/a> about the judge\u2019s humor and grace. After writing some harsh critiques of an early draft of Sex and Reason<\/em>, Lessig faxed Posner to apologize for his tone. Posner swiftly replied, \u201cPlease. I am surrounded by sycophants. The last thing I need is one more.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Professor Jamal Greene of Columbia might have the most fitting encapsulation of Posner\u2019s career<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

It is perhaps the ultimate tribute that everyone in the legal academy, no matter their views, has strenuously disagreed with something Richard Posner has written, and still they read the next thing. May he rest in peace.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Dick Posner took big intellectual swings and made himself impossible to ignore. And he did it a lot. Not that he can be reduced to a pile of numbers. In fact, this post is approaching 2300 words and it still seems inadequate, but it\u2019s time to hit publish so it\u2019ll have to do its best to stand in for all that could be said. Presumably, Posner would\u2019ve passed along some edits.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Posner wrote more than 3,300 opinions over nearly 36 years on the Seventh Circuit. He also authored or co-authored over 50 books and published something like 900 journal articles. According to one accounting, Posner averaged 14.7 articles per year over the course of 62 years. He\u2019s the most cited legal scholar of the latter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":167314,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}