Rhetoric and Law – The double life of Richard Posner, America’s most contentious legal reformer by Lincoln Caplan – January-February 2016, Harvard Magazine

“…His ideas about judges and judging command attention because of his authority as a thinker and a doer. His approach to law, some legal scholars contend, makes the field worthy of a Nobel Prize—which he would win, many say, by acclamation. At 77, he has been the most influential American legal scholar during his almost half-century in the academy, for all but one year at the University of Chicago Law School: in 2000, Fred Shapiro, a librarian at Yale Law School, calculated that Posner was the most cited legal scholar “of all time” by a wide margin (Holmes was third). He is also in his thirty-fifth year as a highly respected member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which encompasses Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. He has been among the country’s most influential judges in shaping other court decisions, measured by the number of times other judges have cited his judicial opinions….”