Carl, is it actuallly your view that intelligent people cannot disagree about fundamentals? That smart people cannot be right wing? That is bizarre. The truth is neither so unequivocal nor so forceful as to impress itself on people regardless of their presuppositions. Kisten. Do yourself a favor. Read Posner's Law and Literature, 2d ed., a book with relatively little direct political implications. Enjoy his interesting and well-written accounts of Kafka and Homer and Melville, his incisive discussion of the legal writing of his own hero, Holmes(another right winger on policy issues), and tell me, if you can, that he's not as smart as they come.
For my own interests I will say that in his Problems of Jurisprudence he does a pretty awesome job of understanding and engaging with analytical philosophy, my own non-legal background; I am less satisfied with his treatment of the same in his Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory, but he can still talk to us APs as an equal, as a participant, as someone to contribute, despite being a total autodidact. Given that I know what it takes to learn that stuff--in my case 9 years of grad schooland 4 yrs of undergrad at the best philosophy programs in the ANglo-American world, I find that pretty fucking impressive.
On the bench, he's awesome, you come less than prepared, he'll flay you alive. Come prepared, and he'll still give you a workout, go strauightto the heart ogf the case, seize the key fact or the point of law you hoped he'd miss, and wahle away. He's written dumb opinions, nd lots I disagree with, and mean ones too, but any judge of any political persuasion would be happy to leave as a legacy his top 300 or or so good ones. He'd written about 1700 in 20 years, last time I'd checked, and he writes them himself, his clerks don't draft them for him, any of them.
He's opinionated as hell, but that's common on the bench. Few judges aren't. My old boss on the 7th Cir., the late great Walter Cummings, was one of the few who wasn't. But Judge Cummings didn't havea Theory. He wasn't interested in theory, and while he was a New Deal liberal (Truman's SG, friend of the Kennedys, appointed by Johnson), he really had no politics. He just loved the law. Posner has more theories and ideas on a Sunday than most people do their whole lives. You say Posner comes off as a horses ass, and there's no question that he's socially somewhat awkward. He's a geek. That doesn't make him dumb. He's a geek because he's so smart, and all he does is read and write.
I am a Posnerphile, he's my favorite right winger. But I admire a lot of smart people on the right: Posner, Hayek, Schumpeter, Coase, Scott Arnold, David Lewis, Max Weber, even Heidegger. Cherish your enemies, you'll learn more from then than from your friends.
jks
jks
jks
jks
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