I’m sorry to report the death of my colleague and friend Judge Posner, after a long illness. He spent almost his entire academic career at the University of Chicago, where he joined the faculty in 1969, and remained as a Senior Lecturer after becoming a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in 1981. The initial Chicago memorial notice is here.

A 2009 poll on this blog identified Posner as the most important living legal thinker in America over the past century, and his deep and broad impact is borne out by the more than 160,000 citations to his scholarship as tracked by Google Scholar. On the bench, he was probably the most influential circuit court judge in the country. A recent panel featuring former Posner clerks on the Chicago faculty (Jacob Goldin, Jonathan Masur, Jennifer Nou, and the recently deceased Randal Picker) offers an illuminating account of his contributions and innovations in diverse areas of law.

I first got to know Judge Posner in the mid-1990s, when we had a long type-written correspondence about whether economics is a failed science. Posmer was famously prolific, of course, but he was also a prolific correspondent, and our back-and-forth by snail mail went on for many months and dozens of single-spaced pages. Posner embodied the catholic intellectual spirit of Chicago in his delight in intellectual sparring and his welcome embrace of disagreement. Both at the University of Texas at Austin (where I was teaching when I first got to know Posner) and then as his colleague at Chicago, I invited him several times to talk with the students in my jurisprudence class, which was always a treat. When I visited at Chicago in fall 2006, we did a session on “What Do and What Should Judges Do?” I finally convinced Dick that he was a legal realist, a label he had resisted because he associated it with the outlier views of Jerome Frank and the intellectually superficial Fred Rodell. He was undoubtedly the most important legal realist on the federal bench since Benjamin Cardozo.

Comments are open for remembrances from readers who knew Dick Posner or for those who would like to comment on the significance of his work.

UPDATE: The NYT obituary.