Richard Allen Posner, legal academic and federal court judge, was born in 1939 in New York. He was educated at Yale and Harvard Law School and has taught at the University of Chicago for many years. He was appointed to the federal appellate bench in 1981 and served as the chief judge of his court from 1993 to 2000. He is a leading advocate of the economic analysis of law and, by his own description, a legal pragmatist.

Economics of Law

Posner has argued that the various doctrines of the common law can best be explained as wealth maximizing. To say that a transaction or institution is wealth maximizing is to say that it creates more wealth than alternative possible transactions or institutions. Wealth, in this usage, is the value that goods have in the hands of their owners, and the value that a thing will have in...