Zu Richard Posner
Ronald Dworkin über Richard Posner:
Richard Posner is the wonder of the legal world. He is Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit Court of AppealsRonald Reagan appointed him to that court in 1981and he is therefore one of the busiest and most important federal judges of the nation. He is an authority on antitrust law, and was recently appointed an arbitrator in the huge Microsoft antitrust suit. He was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for many years before he became a judge, and he continues to teach there as a senior lecturer. He has produced books on a variety of legal subjects in numbers that would be amazing even if he had no other responsibilities. To judge from the copious footnotes in all his books, he is a voracious speed-reader as well.
Posner gained his academic reputationand his appeal to conservative politiciansby popularizing the "economic analysis" thesis that has had surprising influence in American law schools for decades: that law should be designed to ensure that assets and opportunities are in the hands of those who can and would pay most to have them. He has argued, for example, that mothers should be permitted to auction off their newborn babies, and that criminal laws prohibiting rape are justified because "even if the rapist cannot find a consensual substitute it does not follow that he values the rape more than the victim disvalues it." In recent years he has qualified his enthusiasm for wealth maximization, however: though his arguments on almost every subject are still dominated by economic speculation, he now believes that law is to be tested not against the single goal of increasing collective wealth but against the much more general goal of "pragmatism." He means that law should aim at achieving the best consequences overall, taking into account not only the community's overall wealth but other desirable consequences as well.
Der ganze Artikel findet sich im New York Review of Books.
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