As both a federal judge and an author, Posner is well qualified to provide us with this timely overview of the leading trends currently guiding American legal thought. Promoting the concept of legal theory as a unified field of social science, the author delineates five areas for particular scrutiny: economics, history, psychology, epistemology, and quantitative empiricism. Posner cleverly argues for the transformation of the practice of law to an academic discipline by noting some of the inherent advantages...An empirical approach to the law can, the author claims, shed new light on issues such as campaign finance reform, free speech, and regulation of the Internet.
   --Philip Y. Blue, Library Journal

[Posner's] book provides an "external analysis" of the law and immerses the reader in an incredible discourse of the application of economics, history, psychology and epistemology to a variety of legal subjects...The attentive reader will be fascinated, not only by the extraordinary depth of the discussion, but by the successful way this Renaissance judge has attempted to develop a more responsive legal system by using the fresh perspective of extra-legal disciplines.
   --Ellen M. Heller, Baltimore Sun

Posner offers insights into such controversial issues as hate crime legislation, controls over speech on the Internet, the costs and benefits of the jury system, and the standards for excluding categories of evidence from trial. [Posner's] take on these issues is unfailingly original, crisply expressed and appropriately qualified by recognition of the limitations as well as the strengths of theory applied to real-world problems.
   --Publishers Weekly

After somewhat controversial forays into the debates over Bill Clinton's impeachment...and the 2000 presidential election...Judge Posner is back where he seems most comfortable, waxing at length over the relationship between legal theory and other academic disciplines including economics, psychology, history, and statistics...[H]is argument that legal practice itself should be treated as an academic discipline like any other is original, crisply explained, and should serve as fodder for future discussion.
   --D. Yalof, Choice

Richard A. Posner is Circuit Judge, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.

Read More by Richard A. Posner:

• Law and Literature, Revised and Enlarged Edition
• The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory
• Private Choices and Public Health: The AIDS Epidemic in an Economic Perspective
• The Economics of Justice
• The Federal Courts: Challenge and Reform, Revised Edition
• Overcoming Law
• The Problems of Jurisprudence
• Sex and Reason
• An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton
• The Economic Structure of Tort Law
• Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline
• Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy
• The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law
• Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, With a New Preface and Epilogue
• How Judges Think
• Law and Literature, Third Edition
• A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression