Richard Posner

Richard Posner (1939– ) is an American jurist, legal theorist, and economist who served for thirty-six years as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Posner is the most influential exponent of the law and economics movement, applying the tools of Chicago School price theory to virtually every domain of law — from torts and contracts to constitutional interpretation and judicial procedure. His central methodological claim is that legal rules should be evaluated by their efficiency consequences, and that common law doctrines, developed over centuries of litigation, tend toward efficiency even when judges do not consciously intend it. Posner's prolific scholarship — over forty books and hundreds of articles — made him the most cited legal scholar of the twentieth century, though critics argue that his relentless economic imperialism reduces justice to wealth maximization and dissolves legal rights into cost-benefit calculations.

Posner treated law as a branch of economics and called it realism. But realism about what? About incentives, yes. About power, no. A legal theory that cannot account for who has the resources to litigate is not a theory of law. It is a theory of markets with courthouses.