Introduction to Baxter Symposium.

• Author: Posner, Richard A.
• Position: Testimonial to William Baxter

Introduction to Baxter Symposium

I met Bill Baxter more than 30 years ago, in the fall of 1967, when I interviewed for a job at the Stanford Law School. I was instantly, immensely, and permanently impressed by the power of his mind and the clarity of his expression, incidentally mimicked by his precisely chiseled features and precise, clipped enunciation. I got the job, and we were colleagues for the year that I taught at Stanford before moving on to the University of Chicago. I learned much from him that year and after. Although Bill's greatest influence has been on antitrust law, he was one of the earliest lawyers to use economic analysis outside of what until the 1960s had been the gilded law-economics ghetto of antitrust and regulated industries. His first article, published in 1963, applied an informal economic analysis to conflict of laws;(1) needless to say, this was the first time such a thing had been attempted. Today, 35 years later, it continues to be cited as a major contribution to the scholarly literature on conflict of laws, even though Baxter never wrote anything else on conflicts and as a result never achieved a high profile in the field. Later he wrote important articles and monographs on environmental topics, in particular airplane noise.(2) I believe he was the first to emphasize the possibility of an "expanded firm" solution to some environmental issues: internalizing externalities by making the polluter buy the property adversely affected by his pollution. The subtitle of one of Baxter's environmental monographs, The Case for Optimal Pollution,(3) will give you a sense of how an economist looks at environmental issues. He also did an important empirical study applying public-choice theory to antitrust.(4) And I believe that he was one of the first lawyers (maybe the first) to use calculus in the economic analysis of a legal issue.(5)

I have been speaking thus far only of Bill's academic accomplishments. In 1981 he became the head of the Justice Department's antitrust division. His administration of the division was the most distinguished since Thurman Arnold's, or perhaps ever; and it has not been equaled since. It proved to be a turning point in U.S. antitrust policy, and along with the breaking of the air controllers' strike was one of the defining moments of the Reagan Administration. "[F]rostily cerebral, fiercely independent,"(6) and alarmingly candid--as when he referred to the "whacko theories and rubbish...