William Domnarski’s new biography of Richard Posner, at 256 pages, could scarcely fail to be more than a rather cursory summary of the sixty-year oeuvre of one of America’s most verbose judges, who also claims to be an economist and an intellectual across a broad front of the humanities and social sciences.1 The raison d’être of the book is that the author, William Domnarski, a specialist lawyer and writer on legal issues and the American judiciary, regards Posner, as do many others, as a man of uncommonly original opinion, and one who has, to a considerable degree, “dominated” American law for many years.
Posner is the only son of a pair of Jewish Communist fugitives from the inhospitable Eastern Europe of the early twentieth century. Irreligious, apparently not over-affectionate parents, they were fiercely ambitious for their son (an only child born in their later thirties, in 1939), and they were financially successful, moving from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Scarsdale in 1948. Young Richard was a very diligent and precocious student through school and on to Yale College and Harvard Law.
I appeared twice as an appellant (and therefore not in person) before Posner in a criminal case in 2008 and 2010. For the purposes of this review, I have done my best to retain a dispassionate opinion and will touch on my own case when it arrives in this review of Domnarski’s chronology.
Posner was a brilliant student, apparently fairly well
