Asher Schechter — Richard Posner: “The Real Corruption is the Ownership of Congress by the Rich”

Judge Posner has some harsh words for the contemporary American political and judicial systems.

ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Richard Posner: “The Real Corruption is the Ownership of Congress by the Rich”
Asher Schechter

Lars Syll — ‘How I became a Keynesian’ — Richard Posner

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir? — John Maynard Keynes 

Reply to a criticism during the Great Depression of having changed his position on monetary policy, as quoted in "The Keynes Centenary" by Paul Samuelson, in The Economist Vol. 287 (1983), p. 19; later in The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul Samuelson, Volume 5 (1986), p. 275; also in "Understanding Political Development: an Analytic Study" (1987) by Myron Weiner, Samuel P. Huntington and Gabriel Abraham Almond, p. xxiv; this has also been paraphrased as "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" — Wikiquote

Richard Posner apparently agrees. What about the rest of them?

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
‘How I became a Keynesian’ — Richard Posner
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Lars P. Syll — ‘How I became a Keynesian’ (Richard Posner)

Comparable to Nixon's "We are all Keynesians now," Richard Posner embraces Keynes and throws Mankiw under the bus. This is a quote you will want to keep and cherish.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
‘How I became a Keynesian’Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

digby — When fascism came to America ... it was wearing a black robe

“I think privacy is actually overvalued,” Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, said during a conference about privacy and cybercrime in Washington, D.C., Thursday. 

“Much of what passes for the name of privacy is really just trying to conceal the disreputable parts of your conduct,” Posner added. “Privacy is mainly about trying to improve your social and business opportunities by concealing the sorts of bad activities that would cause other people not to want to deal with you.”…

“If the NSA wants to vacuum all the trillions of bits of information that are crawling through the electronic worldwide networks, I think that’s fine,” he said.

In the name of national security, U.S. lawmakers should give the NSA “carte blanche,” Posner added. “Privacy interests should really have very little weight when you’re talking about national security,” he said. “The world is in an extremely turbulent state—very dangerous.”

Hullabaloo
When fascism came to America ... it was wearing a black robe
digby

Brad Friedman — Reagan-Appointed Federal Judge Who Approved First Photo ID Law in 2008 Writes Devastating Dissent AGAINST Photo ID Voting Restrictions

You read that right — Richard Posner — reverses himself.

If you read just one top-to-bottom dismantling of every supposed premise in support of disenfranchising Photo ID voting restrictions laws in your lifetime, let it be this one [PDF]!

Posner is the Milton Friedman of law. This is a big deal. Very bad news for the GOP when one of their heavy-hitters blasts them.

If there was ever evidence that a jurist could change their mind upon review of additional subsequent evidence, this is it. If there was ever a concise and airtight case made against Photo ID laws and the threat they pose to our most basic right to vote, this is it. If there was ever a treatise revealing such laws for the blatantly partisan shell games that they are, this is it. 

His dissent includes a devastating response to virtually every false and/or disingenuous rightwing argument/talking point ever put forth in support of Photo ID voting restrictions, describing them as "a mere fig leaf for efforts to disenfranchise voters likely to vote for the political party that does not control the state government." 

Posner is, by far, the most widely cited legal scholar of the 20th century, according toThe Journal of Legal Studies. His opinions are closely read by the Supreme Court, where the battle over the legality and Constitutionality of Photo ID voting laws will almost certainly wind up at some point in the not too distant future. That's just one of the reasons why this opinion is so important.…

Brad Blog

Reagan-Appointed Federal Judge Who Approved First Photo ID Law in 2008 Writes Devastating Dissent AGAINST Photo ID Voting Restrictions
Brad Friedman

Sara Mayeux — Three Ways of Explaining the Rise of “Law and Economics,” and Also, One Way

Weekend reading. Short summary of the shift in thinking about the relationship of economics and law that led to the conservative legal revolution that has shaped American law and its friendliness to economics interests. No it wasn't only the appointment of conservative judges, but a shift in legal theory based on activism on the part of the Chicago School of neoliberalism. This legal theory is now a cornerstone of US insitutional neoliberalism.

Today it can be hard to understand why applying economics to law could be controversial, both because of the cultural prominence of economics generally and because it has become so commonplace to talk about law in economic terms: to question how regulations affect the efficiency of a particular market, for instance, or to accuse some statutory regime of enacting perverse incentives, or to suggest that some policy has been pushed past the point of diminishing returns.… 

And yet, this particular economic mode of thinking and talking about the law only dates to about 1960, and only became widely influential in the 1970s and ’80s.… 

Between the 1960s and 2014, then, what changed? At the basic level of events and chronology, it is not hard to trace the rise of law and economics. Scholars typically identify the University of Chicago as the relevant holy land, Ronald Coase’s 1960 article, “The Problem of Social Cost,” as the gospel of modern law and economics, and Richard Posner’s 1973 book Economic Analysis of Law, which synthesized and riffed on the burgeoning literature for a wide audience, as its letters from Paul. But to name the key texts and figures in a school of thought is one thing; it’s another to explain how and why those texts and figures gained influence—why anyone read them, much less took them seriously. 

Summary of how we got here.

The cleanest way I can see to synthesize these three accounts would go something like this: [Brad] Snyder’s tale of generational rebellion explains the motivation that drove leading figures like Posner to want to chart a new path in legal thought away from legal process theory. [Daniel] Rodgers’s big-picture intellectual context explains why this particular new path was among the routes visible to them at the moment they began looking (and perhaps why it was among the more attractive such paths). And finally, [Steven] Teles’s nuts-and-bolts account explains why so many others followed down the path, once it had been marked—it reconstructs the vectors of institutional support and funding that brought these ideas into contact with judges, lawyers, legal scholars, and other interested observers of law who might not have had any particular generational motivation to worry about process theory, and who might not have had any particularly systematic exposure to the welter of market concepts that Rodgers discusses, but who, once they encountered law and economics in its various vernacular iterations, decided it sounded plausible enough to them (and/or that it served other interests they had) that they became converts. 

Now maybe that’s not right because there’s some deep flaw with one or more of these accounts that I’m overlooking, or because it’s not the best calibration among the three accounts; and of course it’s too schematic, insofar as it implies that phenomena such as motivation, mindsets, and institutional support operate independently and on entirely different levels from one another. But it strikes me as one plausible enough way to explain the rise of law and economics.

Neoliberalism is basically the application of classical economic liberalism to law and politics. It was spawned by the Chicago School and its spread was funded by wealthy donors.

The trend has been away from traditional thinking toward rational choice theory and the assumptions of neoclassical economics, that is economic liberalism at the expense of social liberalism and its focus on human rights and civil liberties.

U. S. Intellectual History Blog

Three Ways of Explaining the Rise of “Law and Economics,” and Also, One Way
Guest Post by Sara Mayeux, a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a PhD candidate in history at Stanford

Greg Palast — Naughty Nuns, Bad Bankers and Ballot Bandits

On May 6, 2008, 12 fraudulent voters, dressed as nuns, attempted to cast ballots in the presidential primary in Indiana.

Luckily, ten of them were caught, stopped cold by Indiana's new voter photo ID law. The law had been found to be constitutional by Federal Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

It turns out the nuns that Posner's ruling turned away were, in fact, nuns. All the sisters had photo driver's licenses, but they had expired (the licenses, not the nuns). The Sisters of the Holy Cross, had, mercifully, given up driving (they were pushing 90 years of age. 

It was a cute story that ran nationwide. What wasn't so cute, and ran nowhere in the US press, was that 72,000 black voters were blocked at the polls by this Posner-blessed photo ID law.

It was Posner's decision that first allowed states to return to the Jim Crow vote suppression tactics that we thought had vanished with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

In his newly released autobiography, the aging Posner, hearing the wings of mortality and the gavel of Judgment Day coming down, admits that he was stone cold wrong. Posner now concedes that that the voter ID rule was a Republican partisan ploy in intent and viciously racist in practice.

Posner, seeking forgiveness, says it wasn't his fault. He wasn't "really given strong indications that requiring additional voter identification would actually disfranchise people [who are] entitled to vote."

Sorry, your Honor, you're still going straight to Hell. For fibbing.

Read on. Palast takes University of Chicago law professor and US appeals court judge Richard Posner appointed by Ronald Reagan apart at the seams. Palast received a bachelor's degree from University of Chicago and also a master's in business administration."Palast majored in economics at Chicago from the advice of a Weather Underground member he met at Berkeley who suggested Palast "familiarize himself with right-wing politics and learn about the 'ruling elite' from 'the inside.'" (Wikipedia)

Truthout
Naughty Nuns, Bad Bankers and Ballot Bandits
Greg Palast

Kimball Corson — How and Why Did the Antitrust Laws Disappear?

It started with a law professor I had at Chicago. Richard Posner re-read Sec 1 of the Sherman Act to say it literally only protected competition and it did not protect competitors as everyone then supposed, except as absolutely necessary to protect competition, which was view too narrowly as just price competition. Sec 1, adopted back in the 1890's reads:

"Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in [unreasonable] restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal."

(The "unreasonable" limitation was added by judicial gloss and no one disagrees with that.) 

So then, what do we need to have competition under Sec 1, Posner asked. The conclusion he and other Chicagoans reached was it was enough if say two or a few competitors with sizeable market share apparently competed as to price. That was enough to have sufficient competition. It was therefore alright if those few large competitors engaged in anticompetitive acts toward smaller competitors and put them out of business. The apparent competition between big boys was enough to preserve and protect competition. The Sherman Act was not concerned with more....

Wandering the Oceans
How and Why Did the Antitrust Laws Disappear?
Kimball Corson

Richard Posner changes his mind on deregulation

Richard Posner, a well-respected federal judge, said Thursday on Current TV that he no longer believed the financial industry should not be regulated.

“I was an advocate of the deregulation movement and I made — along with other, a lot of smarter people — made a fundamental mistake, which is that deregulation works fine in industries which do not pervade the economy in their consequences,” he said. “The financial industry undergirds the entire economy and if it is made riskier by deregulation and collapses and widespread bankruptcies the entire economy freezes because it runs on credit.”

Posner, who was appointed to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by President Ronald Reagan, is associated with the conservative Chicago School of economics.

The Raw Story
Reagan-appointed judge: Deregulation advocates made a fundamental mistake
Eric W. Dolan

The first mea culpa?