Richard Posner, called by many “the father of Law and Economics,” has passed. He was 87. Posner is one of the most prolific and influential legal intellectuals in history.  I have taught his economic theories for decades. His contribution to American law is immense and generational. Both a towering academic and judicial figure, Posner changed our understanding of the law and left an unparalleled corpus of work, including dozens of major cases and books.

I had just come back from a trip when one of my torts students came up to me at the start of class to tell me that Richard Posner had passed. I cannot say I was surprised. He was struggling for years with health issues, but I felt a great sense of loss that is shared by thousands. It is hard to express what a vacuum has been left by his passing.

I first met Posner as an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago decades ago. Over time, my views on the law would evolve, including an embrace of economic analysis. Posner generated books at a furious pace. It reflected his explosive brilliance and intellectual appetite. His books on economics would stretch across fields from torts to contracts to constitutional law. Even altruism and sex would become subjects of his keen and penetrating analysis.

When President Ronald Reagan appointed him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 1981, many of us thought it might be a waste of one of the greatest intellectual minds in American legal history. However, in his almost 40 years on the Court, Posner would leave an equally powerful legacy in opinions.

Posner’s brilliance was obvious and inexhaustible. He was the head of the Harvard Law Review and graduated at the top of his class. He clerked on the Supreme Court before joining the Stanford and then the Chicago law faculties.

Ironically, viewed as a political conservative, Posner came from parents who were Communists and clerked for the iconic liberal justice, William Brennan.

Posner would become one of the founders of the prestigious Journal of Legal Studies in 1972.

I have always loved the fact that these Jewish refugees from Romania would come to this country with virtually nothing, but live to see their son rise to become one of the most respected intellectuals in the world. While he would reject their political views, his career is also a testament to them. (His son, Eric, has continued his legacy as a law professor at the University of Chicago).

I had the honor of interacting with Posner over the years, including a couple of speaking engagements. You rarely had a casual conversation on the law with Posner. He was blazingly bright and inexhaustible. I loved that intensity, which never diminished, as well as an uncompromising honesty that could be acerbic and pointed.

For generations, Richard Posner has been the North Star on the incorporation of efficiency principles in the law. He showed how such principles could offer a common and workable basis for legal doctrines. While morality is varied and hotly debated, economic theory offered an objective standard to measure different rules.

Posner argued that “the economic norm of ‘wealth maximization’ provides a firmer basis for a normative theory of law than does utilitarianism” or ethical theories. He was fearless and direct in his writings. In The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory, he wrote:

 “[M]orality is local. There are no interesting moral universals. There are tautological ones, such as “Murder is wrong,” where “murder” means “wrongful killing,” and there are a few rudimentary principles of social cooperation – such as “Don’t lie all the time” or “Don’t break promises without any reason” or “Don’t kill your relatives or neighbors indiscriminately” – that may be common to all human societies. If one wants to call these rudimentary principles the universal moral law, fine; but as a practical matter, no moral code can be criticized by appealing to norms that are valid across cultures, norms to which the code of a particular culture is a better or a worse approximation. Those norms, the rudimentary principles of social cooperation that I have mentioned, are too abstract to serve as standards for moral judgment.”

His writings challenged calcified notions and often irritated many in academia and in the courts. He was always his own man, willing to confront what he viewed as hypocrisy on the left and the right. Many, including his admirers, found themselves on the defense in his writings. However, he was universally respected for his brilliance and his intellectual integrity.

It is very hard to see the passing of such a genius, but our sorrow is tempered by our gratitude for what he left in his wake. Richard Posner will continue to shape law students and lawyers for generations to come. He was irreplaceable and will be greatly missed.

Rest in peace and well done.