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Judge Richard Allen Posner (born January 11 , 1939 , New York City ) is currently a judge on the United States Court Of Appeals For The Seventh Circuit . He is a major voice in the " Law And Economics " movement, which he helped start while a professor at the University Of Chicago Law School . Posner attended Yale College (A.B., 1959, summa cum laude) and Harvard Law School (LL.B, 1962, magna cum laude) where he was President of the Harvard Law Review and graduated first in his class, thereafter Clerking for Justice William J. Brennan of the United States Supreme Court during the 1962 - 1963 term. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in 1969 , where he remains a senior lecturer and where his son Eric Posner is a law professor. President Ronald Reagan appointed Posner to the Seventh Circuit in 1981 . He served as chief judge of the court from 1993 to 2000 . He famously opposed the right of privacy in 1981 by arguing that the kinds of interests protected under privacy are not distinctive. He contended that privacy is protected in ways that are economically inefficient. As a judge, however, he has written several opinions sympathetic to abortion rights, including a decision holding " Partial-birth Abortion " constitutionally protected in some circumstances. In another famous legal position, Richard Posner has written favorably of Efficient Breach of contracts - that is, that efficient breach encourages the most efficient allocation of resources by allowing a seller to breach a contract to sell goods to one buyer when another, more lucrative opportunity comes along. The seller may thus be able to realize a sufficiently increased profit to make more money even after repaying the difference to the original buyer. Therefore, no value is lost in the transaction because the original buyer is in the same position he would have been but for the breach, and the seller is in a better position. Richard Posner's political ideology is hard to describe neatly. His parents were affiliated with the American Communist party, and in his youth and in the 1960s as law clerk to Justice Brennan he was generally counted as a liberal. However, in reaction to some of the perceived excesses of the late 1960s Posner developed a strongly conservative bent. Today, although generally considered a man of the right, Posner's Pragmatism , his qualified Moral Relativism , and his affection for Friedrich Nietzsche set him apart from most American conservatives. Among his other influences are the American jurists Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Learned Hand . Posner has written several books on jurisprudence and legal philosophy, including ''The Problems of Jurisprudence;'' ''Sex and Reason;'' ''Overcoming Law;'' ''Law, Pragmatism and Democracy;'' and ''The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory.'' Posner has a reputation for prolific publication of articles and books on a diverse number of topics including the 2000 Presidential Election recount controversy, the Monica Lewinsky scandal and resulting impeachment of President Bill Clinton , and the 2003 Invasion Of Iraq . Posner has realized his greatest influence through his writings on law and economics - '' The New York Times '' called him "one of the most important Antitrust scholars of the past half-century." In December 2004 , Judge Posner started a joint Blog with Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker . Judge Posner has characterized the US's War on Drugs as "quixotic." While some mentioned Posner in 2005 as a Potential Nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor because of his prominence as a scholar and an appellate judge, he was never seriously considered for the post because of his age and because it was felt his writings would be used against him by both the left and the right. A 2004 poll by '' Legal Affairs '' magazine named Posner one of the top twenty legal thinkers in the U.S. EXTERNAL LINKS |