Reflections on Judging

摘要

Among economists, Richard Posner is best known as a member of the Chicago School and a founding father of Law and Economics. Posner is a prolific scholar. He has written or edited more than forty books and authored more than four hundred articles. He is the most cited legal scholar of all time (Shapiro 2000b), and his seminal treatise Economic Analysis of Law, first published in 1973 and now in its ninth edition (Posner 2014), is among the most cited legal texts published in recent decades (Shapiro 2000a). Posner has amazingly done much of his academic writing "on the side." Since 1981, his day job has been as a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Posner has been equally productive as a federal appellate judge. By his own account, Posner has heard oral argument in more than six thousand cases, read many more than fifteen thousand briefs, and written more than 2,800 published judicial opinions (p. 2).