Richard Posner

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Richard Allen Posner (; born January 11, 1939) is an American legal scholar who served as a federal appellate judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1981 to 2017. A senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Posner was identified by ''The Journal of Legal Studies'' as the most-cited legal scholar of the 20th century. As of 2021, he is also the most-cited legal scholar of all time. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential legal scholars in the United States.

Posner is known for his scholarly range and for writing on topics outside of his primary field, law. In his various writings and books, he has addressed animal rights, feminism, drug prohibition, same-sex marriage, Keynesian economics, law and literature, and academic moral philosophy, among other subjects.

Posner is the author of nearly 40 books on jurisprudence, economics, and several other topics, including ''Economic Analysis of Law'', ''The Economics of Justice'', ''The Problems of Jurisprudence'', ''Sex and Reason'', ''Law, Pragmatism and Democracy'', and ''The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy''. Posner has generally been identified as being politically conservative; in recent years, however, he has distanced himself from the positions of the Republican Party, authoring more liberal rulings involving same-sex marriage and abortion. In ''A Failure of Capitalism'', he writes that the 2008 financial crisis caused him to question the rational-choice, ''laissez-faire'' economic model that lies at the heart of his law and economics theory.