Posner, Richard Allen, 1939-, American jurist and author, b. New York City, grad. Yale (A.B., 1959), Harvard Law School (LL.B., 1962). He clerked for Supreme Court Justice William Brennan and was an assistant at the Federal Trade Commission (1963-65) and to the solicitor general (1966-68) before becoming (1968) an associate professor at Stanford Law School and a professor (1969) at the Univ. of Chicago Law School. Remaining at Chicago as a senior lecturer, he was appointed (1981) to the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and served (1993-2000) as its chief judge. Unconventional, influential, and pragmatically conservative as a judicial activist and a legal theorist, Posner is especially known for his advocacy of an economic approach to law. He has written hundreds of articles and almost 40 books on a plethora of subjects. His books include Economic Analysis of Law (1972; 6th ed., 2003), Antitrust Law (1976), Law and Literature (1988, repr. 1998), Problems of Jurisprudence (1990), Sex and Reason (1992), The Federal Courts (1996), Catastrophe: Risk and Response (2004), Preventing Surprise Attacks (2005), and Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency (2006).