Posner, 87, was well known to law students

Renowned federal judge and legal scholar Richard A. Posner died on November 10.

Adam Liptak wrote a superb obituary for The New York Times. 

The Liptak obituary referenced a famously enjoyable profile of Posner in The New Yorker in 2001, penned by staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar. My favorite line in that piece, quoted by Liptak, is when Posner compared himself to his cat:

"'I have exactly the same personality as my cat,' Posner likes to say. 'I am cold, furtive, callous, snobbish, selfish, and playful, but with a streak of cruelty.'"

In studies such as Fred Shapiro's, Posner is routinely identified as a most-cited legal scholar of all time. Accordingly, he makes an outsized appearance in treatises in law school, so has had immense influence on generations of lawyers and law professors.

In my tort law textbooks for law students, I gently characterized Posner as "cantankerous." 

Students encounter him first in 1 Tortz (2025 ed.), in a study of negligence I derived from the prior work of a mentor, Professor Marshall Shapo. In the study, Judge Learned Hand famously ruled against a tugboat company for failing to have a radio that might have averted an accident, even though radios were not yet standard in the business. 

In counterpoint, in Chaulk v. Volkswagen (7th Cir. 1986), a dissenting Judge Posner railed against "a system of people’s justice, where six laymen are allowed to condemn an entire industry on the basis of absurd testimony by a professional witness." From Posner's perspective, a court that uses tort law to override industry norms, whether through the rationalization of a Hand analysis or the artifact of a lay jury, usurps the authority of a duly elected legislature or regulatory body.

Posner is mentioned more than 50 times in 1 & 2 Tortz (2025 ed.), which excerpt his court opinions and scholarly work.

Judge Posner died in Chicago at age 87.