Richard Posner (Federal Appeals Judge), a Founder of Law and Economics Who Once Taught at Stanford, Dies at 87

Richard Posner was known as the federal appeals judge and legal scholar who made economics a central tool for deciding legal questions.  He died Tuesday, Nov. 10, the University of Chicago Law School said.  No cause of death or place of death was given.  He was 87.

Before his decades in Chicago, Posner had a Silicon Valley chapter:  he joined the Stanford Law School faculty as an associate professor in 1968 and taught there for a year before moving to the University of Chicago Law School in 1969, according to his biography at the Federal Judicial Center.

Posner was born Jan. 11, 1939, in New York City.  He graduated from Yale College in 1959 and from Harvard Law School in 1962, then clerked for Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr.  He went on to work at the Federal Trade Commission and in the office of the U.S. solicitor general, and served as general counsel of a presidential task force on communications.

At Chicago he became a founder of the law and economics movement, which judges legal rules by their costs, benefits and incentives.  His 1973 book, “Economic Analysis of Law,” helped define the field, and he became one of the most-cited legal scholars in the country.  He wrote dozens of books on subjects ranging from antitrust and jurisprudence to the 2000 presidential recount and the 2008 financial crisis.

President Ronald Reagan appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, based in Chicago, in 1981.  He served as its chief judge from 1993 to 2000 and wrote thousands of opinions, known for their plain language and focus on practical results.  Long seen as a conservative, he later wrote rulings welcomed by liberals, including a 2014 decision striking down same-sex marriage bans in Indiana and Wisconsin.  He retired from the bench on Sept. 2, 2017.

Posner is survived by his spouse, Charlene Horn, and his sons, Kenneth Posner and Eric Posner.