Law Commons^™

Judge Richard Posner On Civil Liberties: Pragmatic Authoritarian Libertarian, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

How do you reconcile an opinion like Edmond v Goldsmith with the anti-civil-libertarian positions that Richard Posner advocates in his book Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency? The book itself is self-consciously directed against a civil libertarian framework. "The sharpest challenge to the approach that I am sketching," Posner knowingly anticipates, "will come from civil libertarians," by which he means those "adherents to the especially capacious view of civil liberties that is often advanced in litigation and lobbying by the American Civil Liberties Union." In his book, Richard Posner argues in defense of the …