Home > Author > Richard A. Posner
1 " But the fact that judges follow precedent regularly even though not invariably does not support the legalistic theory as strongly as one might expect. The original precedent in a line of precedents could not have been based on precedent. "
― Richard A. Posner , How Judges Think
2 " The Bluebook is an absurdity, but it endures, in fact thrives, impervious to criticism and ridicule. The judiciary navigates the sea of modernity, slowed, thrown of course, by the barnacles of legal formalism (semantic escapes from reality, impoverished sense of context, fear of math and science, insensitivity to language and culture, mangling of history, superfluous footnotes, verbosity, excessive quotation, reader-unfriendly prose, exaggeration, bluster, obsession with citation form) – an accumulation of many centuries, yet constantly augmented. There is little desire to give the hull a good scraping. There is fear that the naked hull would be unslightly, even unseaworthy. The fear is overblown. A week after all the copies of the Bluebook were burned, their absence would not be noticed. "
― Richard A. Posner , Reflections on Judging
3 " A poem by Rudyard Kipling says derisively of people who despise soldiers and police that they make ‘mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep.’ You are likely to have a strong reaction pro or con to this sentiment and how Kipling expressed it, but you will not be able to defend your view with arguments that would convince someone who has the opposite reaction. If you are intellectually sophisticated you mare recognize that your conviction, however strong, cannot be shown to be ‘right,’ but at most reasonable. Yet that recognition will not weaken the strength of your conviction or its influence on your behavior.” 105-06 (quoting Rudyard Kipling, Tommy.) "
4 " I do not apologize for these terms or, more generally, for discussing judicial thinking in a vocabulary alien to most judges and lawyers. Judicial behavior cannot be understood in the vocabulary that judges themselves use, sometimes mischievously. (11) "
5 " The outstanding examples are still Cardozo’s Nature of the Judicial Process18 "
6 " Marcuse also believed that sexuality was a political., an ideological, category, not found but made. "
― Richard A. Posner , Sex and Reason
7 " A Supreme Court Justice writing about constitutional theory is like a dog walking on his hind legs; the wonder is not that it is done well but that it is done at all. "
8 " Capitalism is not a synonym for free markets. "
― Richard A. Posner
9 " There are really only two standards of appellate review: plenary and deferential. Conventionally there are four basic standards (with many variants), which in ascending order of deference to the trial court or administrative agency are de novo, clearly erroneous, substantial evidence, and abuse of discretion. But the last three are, in practice, the same, because finer distinctions are beyond judges’ cognitive capacity. The multiplication of unusual distinctions is a familiar judicial pathology. "
10 " Philosophers used to think that “testimony” (that is, what other people tell us) was at the bottom of that hierarchy; above were perception, memory, and inference, in descending order of reliability. Yet for reasons that Wittgenstein demonstrated, the ladder is rotten. Because of limitations of time and intellect, we perforce base most of our beliefs on testimony, such as the testimony of scientists concerning cosmological and microscopic phenomena. Many of these beliefs are more reliable than those based on perception, memory, or inference. This is true even though we judge the reliability of testimony largely on the basis of other testimony (I believe that my birth certificate has the date of my birth right in part because of what I have heard about governmental recording of vital statistics and in part because of what my parents told me)—that is, even though much of our knowledge is based on hearsay, much of it double or triple or even more remote hearsay. "
― Richard A. Posner , Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy
11 " One understands why law clerks follow the Bluebook. But why a judge would direct his law clerks to do so, or even tolerate their doing so, is a mystery to me. Are judges sheep? Why should they care what kids at the Harvard Law Review consider proper abbreviation? "
12 " There is no reason why pragmatists steeped in Darwinism should not be reactionary or conservative, and so it is no surprise that some have been. "
13 " The pragmatic mood is already visible in the Odyssey. The poem opens with Odysseus living on a remote island ruled by a nymph who offers him immortality if he will remain as her consort. A bit surprisingly to anyone steeped in the orthodox Western religio-philosophical-scientific tradition, he refuses, preferring mortality and a dangerous struggle to regain his position as the king of a small, rocky island and be reunited with his son, aging wife, and old father. He turns down what the orthodox tradition says we should desire above all else, the peace that comes from overcoming the transience and vicissitudes of mortality, whether that peace takes the form of personal immortality or of communing with eternal verities, moral or scientific—in either case ushering us to the still point of the turning world. Odysseus prefers going to arriving, struggle to rest, exploring to achieving—curiosity is one of his most marked traits—and risk to certainty. The Odyssey situates Calypso’s enchanted isle in the far west, the land of the setting sun, and describes the isle in images redolent of death. In contrast, Odysseus’s arrival at his own island, far to the east, a land of the rising sun, is depicted in imagery suggestive of rebirth.Another thing that is odd about the protagonist, and the implicit values, of the Odyssey from the orthodox standpoint is that Odysseus is not a conventional hero, the kind depicted in the Iliad. He is strong, brave, and skillful in fighting, but he is no Achilles (who had a divine mother) or even Ajax; and he relies on guile, trickery, and outright deception to a degree inconsistent with what we have come to think of as heroism or with its depiction in the Iliad. His dominant trait is skill in coping with his environment rather than ability to impose himself upon it by brute force. He is the most intelligent person in the Odyssey but his intelligence is thoroughly practical, adaptive. Unlike Achilles in the Iliad, who is given to reflection, notably about the heroic ethic itself, Odysseus is pragmatic. He is an instrumental reasoner rather than a speculative one.He is also, it is true, distinctly pious, a trait that the Odyssey harps on and modern readers tend to overlook. But piety in Homeric religion is a coping mechanism. Homeric religion is proto-scientific; it is an attempt to understand and control the natural world. The gods personify nature and men manipulate it by “using” the gods in the proper way. One sacrifices to them in order to purchase their intervention in one’s affairs—this is religion as magic, the ancestor of modern technology—and also to obtain clues to what is going to happen next; this is the predictive use of religion and corresponds to modern science. The gods’ own rivalries, mirroring (in Homeric thought, personifying or causing) the violent clash of the forces of nature, prevent human beings from perfecting their control over the environment. By the same token, these rivalries underscore the dynamic and competitive character of human existence and the unrealism of supposing that peace and permanence, a safe and static life, are man’s lot. Odysseus’s piety has nothing to do with loving God as creator or redeemer, or as the name, site, metaphysical underwriter, or repository of the eternal or the unchanging, or of absolutes (such as omniscience and omnipotence) and universals (numbers, words, concepts). Odysseus’s piety is pragmatic because his religion is naturalistic—is simply the most efficacious means known to his society for controlling the environment, just as science and technology are the most efficacious means by which modern people control their environment. "