Richard A. Posner

American federal appellate judge (Seventh Circuit, 1981–2017) and prolific legal scholar, best known outside this vault as a founder of the law-and-economics movement. Matters to this vault as the sharpest documented critic of James Q. Whitman's reasonable-doubt thesis: his 2008 New Republic review of Whitman's The Origins of Reasonable Doubt grants the book's medieval theological archive but disputes, on timing grounds, that it caused the 18th-century codification of the "beyond reasonable doubt" standard — a specific, mechanism-level rebuttal rather than a general dismissal.

References

• claim-posner-accepts-whitman-history-disputes-causal-timing
• claim-legal-historians-remain-split-among-four-competing-origin-accounts-for-reasonable-doubts-origin