Reflections on Judging. By Richard A. Posner. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. 370 pp. $29.95 cloth.

• Published date: 01 September 2014
• Date: 01 September 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12100

might show new perspectives that contribute to the feminist

critiques of rape reform that Corrigan identifies early in the book

about professionalization, funding issues, and neoliberal ideology.

The unavoidable conclusion of Up Against the Wall is that the

emphasis on criminal prosecutions of rape has short-circuited

the movement against sexual violence. The question begged by the

accumulation of evidence of failure in Corrigan’s work is how to

conceptualize “success” in light of this quandary. While feminists

may not have specifically “theorized” sexual violence adequately in

recent decades, feminist critique and socio-legal methods do offer

rich resources to argue the limits of the mainstream approaches

described in the book and move beyond them. Taken as a whole,

the study confirms the need to reinvigorate feminist identified

coalitions to mobilize resistance and alternatives to conservative

reactions and strategies currently deployed in response to sexual

violence.

∗∗∗

Reflections on Judging. By Richard A. Posner. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 2013. 370 pp. $29.95 cloth.

Reviewed by Jason E. Whitehead, Department of Political Science,

California State University, Long Beach.

From his perch at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh

Circuit, Judge Richard A. Posner has churned out more books in

the last decade than most academics write in their entire careers.

His books on diverse subjects like catastrophic risk (Posner 2004),

intelligence and counter-terrorism (Posner 2005, 2006, 2007), and

the financial crisis (Posner 2009, 2010) reveal a remarkable facility

for analyzing complex systems. This same facility is evident in

Posner’s recent work on judging. Indeed, both How Judges Think

(Posner 2008) and the present volume approach the federal judicial

process by describing and analyzing its complex interactions and by

proposing solutions to manage this complexity. Reflections on

Judging takes a more personal approach. Its analysis of the federal

judiciary is “mixed with personal recollections, references to a

number of [Posner’s] own judicial opinions, and recommendations

to judges and judicial administrators” (p. 11). In the end, Judge

Posner succeeds in describing judicial complexity and proposing

some moderate solutions, but his overall diagnosis of the problem is

overly empiricist.

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