Richard Posner

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Reflections on Judging

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674184653
Total Pages : 423 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (741 download)

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Book Synopsis Reflections on Judging by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book Reflections on Judging written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reflections on Judging, Richard Posner distills the experience of his thirty-one years as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Surveying how the judiciary has changed since his 1981 appointment, he engages the issues at stake today, suggesting how lawyers should argue cases and judges decide them, how trials can be improved, and, most urgently, how to cope with the dizzying pace of technological advance that makes litigation ever more challenging to judges and lawyers. For Posner, legal formalism presents one of the main obstacles to tackling these problems. Formalist judges--most notably Justice Antonin Scalia--needlessly complicate the legal process by advocating "canons of constructions" (principles for interpreting statutes and the Constitution) that are confusing and self-contradictory. Posner calls instead for a renewed commitment to legal realism, whereby a good judge gathers facts, carefully considers context, and comes to a sensible conclusion that avoids inflicting collateral damage on other areas of the law. This, Posner believes, was the approach of the jurists he most admires and seeks to emulate: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Learned Hand, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly, and it is an approach that can best resolve our twenty-first-century legal disputes.

Richard Posner

Author : William Domnarski
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199332339
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (993 download)

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Book Synopsis Richard Posner by : William Domnarski

Download or read book Richard Posner written by William Domnarski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judge Richard Posner is one of the great legal minds of our age, on par with such generation-defining judges as Holmes, Hand, and Friendly. A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the principal exponent of the enormously influential law and economics movement, he writes provocative books as a public intellectual, receives frequent media attention, and has been at the center of some very high-profile legal spats. He is also a member of an increasingly rare breed-judges who write their own opinions rather than delegating the work to clerks-and therefore we have unusually direct access to the workings of his mind and judicial philosophy. Now, for the first time, this fascinating figure receives a full-length biographical treatment. In Richard Posner, William Domnarski examines the life experience, personality, academic career, jurisprudence, and professional relationships of his subject with depth and clarity. Domnarski has had access to Posner himself and to Posner's extensive archive at the University of Chicago. In addition, Domnarski was able to interview and correspond with more than two hundred people Posner has known, worked with, or gone to school with over the course of his career, from grade school to the present day. The list includes among others members of the Harvard Law Review, colleagues at the University of Chicago, former law clerks over Posner's more than thirty years on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and even other judges from that court. Richard Posner is a comprehensive and accessible account of a unique judge who, despite never having sat on the Supreme Court, has nevertheless dominated the way law is understood in contemporary America.

How Judges Think

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674033833
Total Pages : 399 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis How Judges Think by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book How Judges Think written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished and experienced appellate court judge, Richard A. Posner offers in this new book a unique and, to orthodox legal thinkers, a startling perspective on how judges and justices decide cases. When conventional legal materials enable judges to ascertain the true facts of a case and apply clear pre-existing legal rules to them, Posner argues, they do so straightforwardly; that is the domain of legalist reasoning. However, in non-routine cases, the conventional materials run out and judges are on their own, navigating uncharted seas with equipment consisting of experience, emotions, and often unconscious beliefs. In doing so, they take on a legislative role, though one that is confined by internal and external constraints, such as professional ethics, opinions of respected colleagues, and limitations imposed by other branches of government on freewheeling judicial discretion. Occasional legislators, judges are motivated by political considerations in a broad and sometimes a narrow sense of that term. In that open area, most American judges are legal pragmatists. Legal pragmatism is forward-looking and policy-based. It focuses on the consequences of a decision in both the short and the long term, rather than on its antecedent logic. Legal pragmatism so understood is really just a form of ordinary practical reasoning, rather than some special kind of legal reasoning. Supreme Court justices are uniquely free from the constraints on ordinary judges and uniquely tempted to engage in legislative forms of adjudication. More than any other court, the Supreme Court is best understood as a political court.

Divergent Paths

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674286030
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis Divergent Paths by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book Divergent Paths written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-04 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judges and legal scholars talk past one another, if they have any conversation at all. Academics criticize judicial decisions in theoretical terms, which leads many judges to dismiss academic discourse as divorced from reality. Richard Posner reflects on the causes and consequences of this widening gap and what can be done to close it.

Not a Suicide Pact

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199885362
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (998 download)

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Book Synopsis Not a Suicide Pact by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book Not a Suicide Pact written by Richard A. Posner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eavesdropping on the phone calls of U.S. citizens; demands by the FBI for records of library borrowings; establishment of military tribunals to try suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens--many of the measures taken by the Bush administration since 9/11 have sparked heated protests. In Not a Suicide Pact, Judge Richard A. Posner offers a cogent and elegant response to these protests, arguing that personal liberty must be balanced with public safety in the face of grave national danger. Critical of civil libertarians who balk at any curtailment of their rights, even in the face of an unprecedented terrorist threat in an era of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, Posner takes a fresh look at the most important constitutional issues that have arisen since 9/11. These issues include the constitutional rights of terrorist suspects (whether American citizens or not) to habeas corpus and due process, and their rights against brutal interrogation (including torture) and searches based on less than probable cause. Posner argues that terrorist activity is sui generis--it is neither "war" nor "crime"--and it demands a tailored response, one that gives terror suspects fewer constitutional rights than persons suspected of ordinary criminal activity. Constitutional law must remain fluid, protean, and responsive to the pressure of contemporary events. Posner stresses the limits of law in regulating national security measures and underscores the paradoxical need to recognize a category of government conduct that is at once illegal and morally obligatory. One of America's top legal thinkers, Posner does not pull punches. He offers readers a short, sharp book with a strong point of view that is certain to generate much debate. OXFORD'S NEW INALIENABLE RIGHTS SERIES This is inaugural volume in Oxford's new fourteen-book Inalienable Rights Series. Each book will be a short, analytically sharp exploration of a particular right--to bear arms, to religious freedom, to free speech--clarifying the issues swirling around these rights and challenging us to rethink our most cherished freedoms.

Catastrophe

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780195346398
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (463 download)

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Book Synopsis Catastrophe by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book Catastrophe written by Richard A. Posner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-11 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catastrophic risks are much greater than is commonly appreciated. Collision with an asteroid, runaway global warming, voraciously replicating nanomachines, a pandemic of gene-spliced smallpox launched by bioterrorists, and a world-ending accident in a high-energy particle accelerator, are among the possible extinction events that are sufficiently likely to warrant careful study. How should we respond to events that, for a variety of psychological and cultural reasons, we find it hard to wrap our minds around? Posner argues that realism about science and scientists, innovative applications of cost-benefit analysis, a scientifically literate legal profession, unprecedented international cooperation, and a pragmatic attitude toward civil liberties are among the keys to coping effectively with the catastrophic risks.

Overcoming Law

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674649255
Total Pages : 612 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (492 download)

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Book Synopsis Overcoming Law by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book Overcoming Law written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legal theory must become more factual and empirical and less conceptual and polemical, Richard Posner argues in this wide-ranging new book. The topics covered include the structure and behavior of the legal profession; constitutional theory; gender, sex, and race theories; interdisciplinary approaches to law; the nature of legal reasoning; and legal pragmatism. Posner analyzes, in witty and passionate prose, schools of thought as different as social constructionism and institutional economics, and scholars and judges as different as Bruce Ackerman, Robert Bork, Ronald Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Richard Rorty, and Patricia Williams. He also engages challenging issues in legal theory that range from the motivations and behavior of judges and the role of rhetoric and analogy in law to the rationale for privacy and blackmail law and the regulation of employment contracts. Although written by a sitting judge, the book does not avoid controversy; it contains frank appraisals of radical feminist and race theories, the behavior of the German and British judiciaries in wartime, and the excesses of social constructionist theories of sexual behavior. Throughout, the book is unified by Posner's distinctive stance, which is pragmatist in philosophy, economic in methodology, and liberal (in the sense of John Stuart Mill's liberalism) in politics. Brilliantly written, eschewing jargon and technicalities, it will make a major contribution to the debate about the role of law in our society.

The Little Book of Plagiarism

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : Pantheon
ISBN 13 : 0307496538
Total Pages : 130 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis The Little Book of Plagiarism by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book The Little Book of Plagiarism written by Richard A. Posner and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2009-03-12 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise, lively, and bracing exploration of an issue bedeviling our cultural landscape–plagiarism in literature, academia, music, art, and film–by one of our most influential and controversial legal scholars. Best-selling novelists J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown, popular historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose, Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, first novelist Kaavya Viswanathan: all have rightly or wrongly been accused of plagiarism–theft of intellectual property–provoking widespread media punditry. But what exactly is plagiarism? How has the meaning of this notoriously ambiguous term changed over time as a consequence of historical and cultural transformations? Is the practice on the rise, or just more easily detectable by technological advances? How does the current market for expressive goods inform our own understanding of plagiarism? Is there really such a thing as “cryptomnesia,” the unconscious, unintentional appropriation of another’s work? What are the mysterious motives and curious excuses of plagiarists? What forms of punishment and absolution does this “sin” elicit? What is the good in certain types of plagiarism? Provocative, insightful, and extraordinary for its clarity and forthrightness, The Little Book of Plagiarism is an analytical tour de force in small, the work of “one of the top twenty legal thinkers in America” (Legal Affairs), a distinguished jurist renowned for his adventuresome intellect and daring iconoclasm.

An Affair of State

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674042328
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis An Affair of State by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book An Affair of State written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: President Bill Clinton’s year of crisis, which began when his affair with Monica Lewinsky hit the front pages in January 1998, engendered a host of important questions of criminal and constitutional law, public and private morality, and political and cultural conflict. In a book written while the events of the year were unfolding, Richard Posner presents a balanced and scholarly understanding of the crisis that also has the freshness and immediacy of journalism. Posner clarifies the issues and eliminates misunderstandings concerning facts and the law that were relevant to the investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and to the impeachment proceeding itself. He explains the legal definitions of obstruction of justice and perjury, which even many lawyers are unfamiliar with. He carefully assesses the conduct of Starr and his prosecutors, including their contacts with the lawyers for Paula Jones and their hardball tactics with Monica Lewinsky and her mother. He compares and contrasts the Clinton affair with Watergate, Iran–Contra, and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, exploring the subtle relationship between public and private morality. And he examines the place of impeachment in the American constitutional scheme, the pros and cons of impeaching President Clinton, and the major procedural issues raised by both the impeachment in the House and the trial in the Senate. This book, reflecting the breadth of Posner’s experience and expertise, will be the essential foundation for anyone who wants to understand President Clinton’s impeachment ordeal.

Aging and Old Age

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226675688
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (756 download)

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Book Synopsis Aging and Old Age by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book Aging and Old Age written by Richard A. Posner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Observing that people change both physically and cognitively as they age, Posner suggests that each of us has, in succession, two separate selves - younger and older - with different abilities, interests, and behaviors, an insight that helps clarify a number of issues concerning the elderly.

Public Intellectuals

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674042271
Total Pages : 465 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Public Intellectuals by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book Public Intellectuals written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this timely book, the first comprehensive study of the modern American public intellectual--that individual who speaks to the public on issues of political or ideological moment--Richard Posner charts the decline of a venerable institution that included worthies from Socrates to John Dewey. With the rapid growth of the media in recent years, highly visible forums for discussion have multiplied, while greater academic specialization has yielded a growing number of narrowly trained scholars. Posner tracks these two trends to their inevitable intersection: a proliferation of modern academics commenting on topics outside their ken. The resulting scene--one of off-the-cuff pronouncements, erroneous predictions, and ignorant policy proposals--compares poorly with the performance of earlier public intellectuals, largely nonacademics whose erudition and breadth of knowledge were well suited to public discourse. Leveling a balanced attack on liberal and conservative pundits alike, Posner describes the styles and genres, constraints and incentives, of the activity of public intellectuals. He identifies a market for this activity--one with recognizable patterns and conventions but an absence of quality controls. And he offers modest proposals for improving the performance of this market--and the quality of public discussion in America today. This paperback edition contains a new preface and and a new epilogue.

The Economics of Justice

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674252810
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis The Economics of Justice by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book The Economics of Justice written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1983-08-16 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard A. Posner is probably the leading scholar in the rapidly growing field of the economics of law; he is also an extremely lucid writer. In this book, he applies economic theory to four areas of interest to students of social and legal institutions: the theory of justice, primitive and ancient social and legal institutions, the law and economics of privacy and reputation, and the law and economics of racial discrimination. The book is designed to display the power of economics to organize and illuminate diverse fields in the study of nonmarket behavior and institutions. A central theme is the importance of uncertainty to an understanding of social and legal institutions. Another major theme is that the logic of the law, in many ways but not all, appears to be an economic one: that judges, for example, in interpreting the common law, act as if they were trying to maximize economic welfare. Part I examines the deficiencies of utilitarianism as both a positive and a normative basis of understanding law, ethics, and social institutions, and suggests in its place the economist’s concept of “wealth maximization.” Part II, an examination of the social and legal institutions of archaic societies, notably that of ancient Greece and primitive societies, argues that economic analysis holds the key to understanding such diverse features of these societies as reciprocal gift-giving, blood guilt, marriage customs, liability rules, and the prestige accorded to generosity. Many topics relevant to modern social and philosophical debate, including the origin of the state and the retributive theory of punishment, are addressed. Parts III and IV deal with more contemporary social and jurisprudential questions. Part III is an economic analysis of privacy and the statutory and common law rules that protect privacy and related interests—rules that include the tort law of privacy, assault and battery, and defamation. Finally, Part IV examines, again from an economic standpoint, the controversial areas of racial and sexual discrimination, with special reference to affirmative action. Both Part III and Part IV develop as a sub-theme the issue of proper standards of constitutional adjudication by the Supreme Court.

Breaking the Deadlock

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400824281
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Breaking the Deadlock by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book Breaking the Deadlock written by Richard A. Posner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2001-07-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2000 Presidential election ended in a collision of history, law, and the courts. It produced a deadlock that dragged out the result for over a month, and consequences--real and imagined--that promise to drag on for years. In the first in-depth study of the election and its litigious aftermath, Judge Posner surveys the history and theory of American electoral law and practice, analyzes which Presidential candidate ''really'' won the popular vote in Florida, surveys the litigation that ensued, evaluates the courts, the lawyers, and the commentators, and ends with a blueprint for reforming our Presidential electoral practices. The book starts with an overview of the electoral process, including its history and guiding theories. It looks next at the Florida election itself, exploring which candidate ''really'' won and whether this is even a meaningful question. The focus then shifts to the complex litigation, both state and federal, provoked by the photo finish. On the basis of the pragmatic jurisprudence that Judge Posner has articulated and defended in his previous writings, this book offers an alternative justification for the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore while praising the Court for averting the chaotic consequences of an unresolved deadlock. Posner also evaluates the performance of the lawyers who conducted the post-election litigation and of the academics who commented on the unfolding drama. He argues that neither Gore's nor Bush's lawyers blundered seriously, but that the reaction of the legal professoriat to the litigation exposed serious flaws in the academic practice of constitutional law. While rejecting such radical moves as abolishing the Electoral College or creating a national ballot, Posner concludes with a detailed plan of feasible reforms designed to avoid a repetition of the 2000 election fiasco. Lawyers, political scientists, pundits, and politicians are waiting to hear what Judge Posner has to say. But this book is written for and will be welcomed by all who were riveted by the recent crisis of presidential succession.

Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674042292
Total Pages : 428 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (422 download)

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Book Synopsis Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A liberal state is a representative democracy constrained by the rule of law. Richard Posner argues for a conception of the liberal state based on pragmatic theories of government. He views the actions of elected officials as guided by interests rather than by reason and the decisions of judges by discretion rather than by rules. He emphasizes the institutional and material, rather than moral and deliberative, factors in democratic decision making. Posner argues that democracy is best viewed as a competition for power by means of regular elections. Citizens should not be expected to play a significant role in making complex public policy regarding, say, taxes or missile defense. The great advantage of democracy is not that it is the rule of the wise or the good but that it enables stability and orderly succession in government and limits the tendency of rulers to enrich or empower themselves to the disadvantage of the public. Posner’s theory steers between political theorists’ concept of deliberative democracy on the left and economists’ public-choice theory on the right. It makes a significant contribution to the theory of democracy—and to the theory of law as well, by showing that the principles that inform Schumpeterian democratic theory also inform the theory and practice of adjudication. The book argues for law and democracy as twin halves of a pragmatic theory of American government.

A Failure of Capitalism

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674051294
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (512 download)

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Book Synopsis A Failure of Capitalism by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book A Failure of Capitalism written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 is the most alarming of our lifetime because of the warp-speed at which it is occurring. How could it have happened, especially after all that we've learned from the Great Depression? Why wasn't it anticipated so that remedial steps could be taken to avoid or mitigate it? What can be done to reverse a slide into a full-blown depression? Why have the responses to date of the government and the economics profession been so lackluster? Richard Posner presents a concise and non-technical examination of this mother of all financial disasters and of the, as yet, stumbling efforts to cope with it. No previous acquaintance on the part of the reader with macroeconomics or the theory of finance is presupposed. This is a book for intelligent generalists that will interest specialists as well. Among the facts and causes Posner identifies are: excess savings flowing in from Asia and the reckless lowering of interest rates by the Federal Reserve Board; the relation between executive compensation, short-term profit goals, and risky lending; the housing bubble fuelled by low interest rates, aggressive mortgage marketing, and loose regulations; the low savings rate of American people; and the highly leveraged balance sheets of large financial institutions. Posner analyzes the two basic remedial approaches to the crisis, which correspond to the two theories of the cause of the Great Depression: the monetarist--that the Federal Reserve Board allowed the money supply to shrink, thus failing to prevent a disastrous deflation--and the Keynesian--that the depression was the product of a credit binge in the 1920's, a stock-market crash, and the ensuing downward spiral in economic activity. Posner concludes that the pendulum swung too far and that our financial markets need to be more heavily regulated. Read Richard Posner's blog, and his latest article in The Atlantic.

The Federal Courts

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674296275
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (962 download)

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Book Synopsis The Federal Courts by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book The Federal Courts written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-15 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on economic and political theory, legal analysis, and his own extensive judicial experience, Posner sketches the history of the federal courts, describes the contemporary institution, appraises concerns that have been expressed with their performance, and presents a variety of proposals for both short-term and fundamental reform.

The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy

Author : Richard A. Posner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674062191
Total Pages : 409 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy by : Richard A. Posner

Download or read book The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following up on his timely and well-received book, A Failure of Capitalism, Richard Posner steps back to take a longer view of the continuing crisis of democratic capitalism as the American and world economies crawl gradually back from the depths to which they had fallen in the autumn of 2008 and the winter of 2009. By means of a lucid narrative of the crisis and a series of analytical chapters pinpointing critical issues of economic collapse and gradual recovery, Posner helps non-technical readers understand business-cycle and financial economics, and financial and governmental institutions, practices, and transactions, while maintaining a neutrality impossible for persons professionally committed to one theory or another. He calls for fresh thinking about the business cycle that would build on the original ideas of Keynes. Central to these ideas is that of uncertainty as opposed to risk. Risk can be quantified and measured. Uncertainty cannot, and in this lies the inherent instability of a capitalist economy. As we emerge from the financial earthquake, a deficit aftershock rumbles. It is in reference to that potential aftershock, as well as to the government's stumbling efforts at financial regulatory reform, that Posner raises the question of the adequacy of our democratic institutions to the economic challenges heightened by the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. The crisis and the government's energetic response to it have enormously increased the national debt at the same time that structural defects in the American political system may make it impossible to pay down the debt by any means other than inflation or devaluation.