Have 7th Circuit Judges Gone Off the Deep End?
Howard J. Bashman 12-11-2006 Related: Bashman Archive In law school, I was fortunate to serve on Law Journal. The bookshelves of the Law Journal’s office served as home to recent issues of soft-cover advance sheets of West Publishing Company’s Federal Reporter (Second Series). Those books contained the recent, precedential rulings of this nation’s federal appellate courts. Perhaps to stave off boredom during staff meetings, I spent many a day at the Law Journal’s offices thumbing through the Federal Reporter advance sheets in search of particularly interesting or well-written federal appellate court rulings. And that’s when I first discovered that opinions written by the 7th Circuit’s Judge Richard A. Posner or Judge Frank H. Easterbrook had a very good chance of being both interesting and well-written. Although my Law Journal tenure occurred from 1987 through 1989, I still vividly recall that a recurring theme in Posner and Easterbrook opinions was that those judges would not hesitate
