cannabisnews.com: Microsoft Mediator Known for Unconventional Ideas





Microsoft Mediator Known for Unconventional Ideas
Posted by FoM on November 20, 1999 at 07:36:42 PT
By Scott Herhold, Mercury News Staff Writer 
Source: San Jose Mercury
U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Posner, the man who will try to mediate the vast gulf between Microsoft Corp. and the government's antitrust lawyers, is considered one of the brightest stars in the American legal galaxy.
But he is an unorthodox thinker who has taken controversial and daring stands on everything from abortion to sexual practices.In fact, it's often said in legal circles that Posner lost his chance to be nominated to the Supreme Court when he suggested that babies should be sold on the open market rather than be placed through adoption agencies.Posner had an argument for what seemed like a wacky idea: He said adoption agencies had a selfish interest in prohibiting competition, and that ``parental rights'' would be more efficiently allocated to the highest bidder.Yet the 60-year-old judge from Chicago has publicly conceded that he has written so tartly and so prolifically -- he has published 31 books on topics, from the administration of courts to Monica Lewinsky -- that he has nurtured a legion of unforgiving critics.``He takes up topic after topic, from homosexuality to women's rights, and has new things to say, challenging the received wisdom,'' says Gerald Gunther, a constitutional-law scholar and professor emeritus at Stanford Law School. ``It makes for a lot of yeast in debates.''Gruff and blunt, but often surprisingly humanitarian in his decisions, Posner is best known as one of the intellectual godfathers of the ``law and economics'' field at the University of Chicago, which argues that economic analysis should bear on legal opinions.This has led him to be critical of much of American regulatory agencies and antitrust law enforcement, which he regards as hindering competition rather than protecting it.Although he is often described as conservative -- and was appointed a judge by President Ronald Reagan -- his thinking edges closer to libertarian. He has described himself as a ``small-government man.'' Posner has rarely avoided a forthright opinion, often delivered with withering erudition. During the impeachment hearings of President Clinton, for example, he suggested that Chief Justice William Rehnquist had adopted a Gilbert and Sullivan costume by adding four gold stripes to each sleeve of his robe.Asked on a television show what he thought of the war on drugs, Posner volunteered that he favored the legalization of marijuana and LSD, which he said ``had never been seriously implicated in anything worse than a psychotic episode.''``It is nonsense that we should be devoting so many law enforcement resources to marijuana,'' he told USA Today in 1995. ``I am skeptical that a society that is so tolerant of alcohol and cigarettes should come down so hard on marijuana use and send people to prison for life without parole.'' And in perhaps his most controversial book -- ``Sex and Reason'' in 1992 -- he provided a mathematical equation to determine whether a society should ban abortions.Posner has said he became interested in an economic analysis of sex after his court was faced with ruling on the constitutionality of an Indiana law that forbade striptease dancing at the Kitty Kat Lounge in South Bend, Ind., if the dancer's nipples were uncovered. ``What kind of people make a career of checking to see whether the covering of a woman's nipples is fully opaque, as the statue requires?'' he said in a 1992 interview. ``The history of censorship is a history of folly and cruelty.'' Born in New York City on Jan. 11, 1939, Posner grew up in the New York metropolitan area and graduated from Yale, where he was a summa cum laude English major. After graduating at the top of his class from Harvard Law School in 1962, he served as a clerk to Justice William Brennan and worked in the solicitor general's office and the Federal Trade Commission.After a brief stop at Stanford, where he served as an associate professor in the law school in 1968-69, Posner joined the law faculty at the University of Chicago, then the mecca for a new wave of economists who doubted the value of government regulation.Over the next dozen years, Posner had a dramatic impact on legal education and scholarship, particularly with the publication of ``Economic Analysis of Law'' in 1973, in which he argued that judges must take economic analysis into account when crafting their opinions. He urged that judges look at ``wealth maximization'' as a goal of legal policy.One hostile reviewer called it ``400 pages of tunnel vision'' based on an overly neat and simple view of the world.In 1977, Posner became the first president of Lexecon Inc., a firm of lawyers and economists that provided economic and legal research to litigators in antitrust and securities cases.But his career in private consulting ended when Reagan appointed him a federal appellate judge in 1981. He became chief judge of the Seventh Circuit in 1993, although he continues to carry a one-third teaching load at the University of Chicago Law School.Some law professors who follow his opinions say his economics approach has moderated a bit on the bench.``He started out believing that economics should be applied to everything,'' said Margaret Jane Radin, a Stanford University law professor. ``Then, when he became a judge, he realized it wasn't so simple. There were lots of contentions, and you had to go slower and have some institutional concern for getting consensus.''Posner's decisions have frequently defied predictability or easy categorization. He wrote an opinion barring a municipality from displaying a lighted cross during the Christmas season. And he's upheld the right of state officials to mandate random drug testing in horse racing.But his sheer productivity stuns even his intellectual adversaries. Posner once told an interviewer that he tried to write more than four pages a day, or roughly 1,400 pages a year.``What I think drives him is this brilliant mind,'' says Stanford's Gunther. ``He seems to be not only the most productive scholar, but the most incredible reader in the field. He seems to have read everything under the sun.'' Published: November 19, 1999©1999 Mercury Center. 
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