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...

 

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