In "Reflections on Judging," Richard Posner distills the experience of his thirty-one years as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Surveying how the judiciary has changed since his 1981 appointment, he engages the issues at stake today, suggesting how lawyers should argue cases and judges decide them, how trials can be improved, and, most urgently, how to cope with the dizzying pace of technological advance that makes litigation ever more challenging to judges and lawyers. For Posner, legal formalism presents one of the main obstacles to tackling these problems. Formalist judges--most notably Justice Antonin Scalia--needlessly complicate the legal process by advocating "canons of constructions" (principles for interpreting statutes and the Constitution) that are confusing and self-contradictory. Posner calls instead for a renewed commitment to legal realism, whereby a good judge gathers facts, carefully considers context, and comes to a sensible conclusion that avoids inflicting collateral damage on other areas of the law. This, Posner believes, was the approach of the jurists he most admires and seeks to emulate: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Learned Hand, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly, and it is an approach that can best resolve our twenty-first-century legal disputes.

【作者簡介】

理查德.波斯納，先後以最優生和年級第一名畢業於耶魯大學英文係（1959）和哈佛大學法學院（1962）。曾任美國聯邦最高法院大法官助理、聯邦政府律師、斯坦福大學法學院副教授（1968）、芝加哥大學法學院教授（1969）和講座教授。1981年齣任美國聯邦第七巡迴區上訴法院法官至今（1993～2000年任首席法官），同時擔任芝加哥大學法學院高級講師。

波斯納是法律經濟學的主要創建者之一，他將經濟學分析的方法推廣到所有的法律領域，為法律經濟學的發展和繁榮做齣瞭卓越的貢獻；此外，他也是「法律與文學」和實用主義法學的領軍人物。波斯納著作眾多，輻射廣泛，有「一個人的智庫」之譽；他的法律學術和司法實踐重塑瞭美國的法學和法律。

【譯者簡介】

蘇力，北京大學法學院教授，主要著述有《法治及其本土資源》、《製度是如何形成的》、《閱讀秩序》、《送法下鄉》等，以及譯著《憲政與分權》、《憲政與民主》、《法理學問題》、《司法過程的性質》、《國傢篇·法律篇》等。