Richard Posner, a prodigious legal scholar and outspoken former federal appeals court judge who pioneered the use of economic theory to resolve legal questions, has died. He was 87.
Posner's opinions have been cited extensively in textbooks that have educated generations of lawyers.
The University of Chicago Law School, where he served as a senior lecturer and one of his sons, Eric Posner, is a professor, said Posner died Tuesday.
Over a nearly 40-year career on the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Posner developed a reputation as an acerbic and witty writer and tough questioner.
In a 2014 opinion striking down same-sex marriage bans in Wisconsin and Indiana, he blasted the states' appeals to tradition, noting historically “bad traditions” such as “cannibalism, foot-binding, and suttee." He also took aim at their argument that opposite-sex couples need inducements to marry for the sake of their children.
“Heterosexuals get drunk and pregnant, producing unwanted children; their reward is to be allowed to marry. Homosexual couples do not produce unwanted children; their reward is to be denied the right to marry," he wrote. "Go figure.”
Posner was appointed to the court in 1981 by Republican President Ronald Reagan, but his legal opinions ran from conservative to liberal, and Posner described his approach to judging as pragmatic. Posner was a leading figure in the use of economic theory to analyze legal rules and institutions. His 1973 textbook, Economic Analysis of Law, was foundational and remains in print today.
As a judge, he wrote thousands of legal opinions, including in a seminal 2017 ruling that found the 1964 Civil Rights Act also barred discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers.
“I don’t see why firing a lesbian because she is in the subset of women who are lesbian should be thought any less a form of sex discrimination than firing a woman because she’s a woman,” Posner wrote.
Outside the court, he authored hundreds of academic articles and dozens of books, and did not withhold his opinions about American institutions. In 2016, he called the Supreme Court “highly politicized,” saying that “probably only” a couple of the justices were qualified, and even they were “not great.”
As a legal scholar, Posner was uniquely “prolific, influential, and endlessly curious," University of Chicago Law School Dean Adam Chilton said.
"He was a giant whose influence on our legal system, the field of law and economics, and on our law school cannot be overstated,” Chilton said in a statement.
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