Rate My Professor Richard Posner

Richard A. Posner is Senior Lecturer in Law (retired) at the University of Chicago Law School. He received an AB summa cum laude from Yale University in 1959, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year, Scholar of the House, and winner of the Saybrook Fellows' Prize. In 1962, he earned an LLB magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, receiving the Fay Diploma, Sears and Beale Prizes, and serving as President of the Harvard Law Review. Posner's early career included clerking for Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. of the Supreme Court (1962-1963), serving as assistant to Commissioner Philip Elman at the Federal Trade Commission (1963-1965) and to Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall (1965-1967), and acting as General Counsel to the President's Task Force on Communications Policy (1967-1968). He joined Stanford Law School as Associate Professor in 1968 before arriving at the University of Chicago Law School in 1969 as Assistant Professor, advancing to Associate Professor in 1970, full Professor in 1971, and Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law from 1978 to 1981. During this period, he was President of Lexecon Inc. (1977-1981) and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (1971-1981).

In 1981, Posner was appointed Circuit Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, serving as Chief Judge from 1993 to 2000 and retiring in 2017, while continuing as Senior Lecturer at Chicago Law School. His research specializations encompass economic analysis of law, antitrust, law and economics, jurisprudence, law and literature, administrative law, regulated industries, and more. Posner authored over 40 books, including Economic Analysis of Law (9th ed., 2014), Law and Literature (3rd ed., 2009), The Problems of Jurisprudence (1990), Overcoming Law (1995), How Judges Think (2008), and Reflections on Judging (2013). He founded and edited the Journal of Legal Studies and co-edited the American Law and Economics Review. Among his major awards are the Ronald H. Coase Medal from the American Law and Economics Association (2010), Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association (2018), Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Award in Law (1994), Learned Hand Medal for Excellence in Federal Jurisprudence (2005), and honorary degrees from universities including Yale, Northwestern, and Georgetown. Posner's pioneering scholarship has profoundly influenced law and economics, antitrust policy, judicial behavior studies, and legal theory.