---
title: "Richard A. Posner"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Richard A. Posner"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-09-04T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["reasonable doubt (theological origins)","James Q. Whitman","law and economics","legal historiography"]
seek_code_commit: "290e6f6"
---


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]]