I've read references to Richard Posner several times over the years and knew enough to to be able to say that he's a pretty prolific author & US Fed judge just a notch or two below the Supreme Court.   He was also selected to mediate the Microsoft Anti-Trust trial which I had some direct experience with.

Through the constant amazement that is the Internet & Google, I found this article that contained a brief intellectual biography of Posner.  The man is fascinating.  First a bit of background that introduces his curmudgeon-like ways:

It is not apparent from his mild exterior that Posner is the most mercilessly seditious legal theorist of his generation. Nor is it obvious that, as a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, he is one of the most powerful jurists in the country, second only to those on the Supreme Court. He is powerful, moreover, not just by merit of his position: he is powerful because he has decided to be. In hearing a case, he doesn't first inquire into the constricting dictates of precedent; instead, he comes up with what strikes him as a sensible solution, then looks to see whether precedent excludes it.

And then, the reason his name popped up so often in my casual reading -- the Law and Economics school:

...As one of the founders of the law-and-economics movement in the nineteen-seventies, he had promoted the idea that laws should be evaluated for their consequences - economic and otherwise - as much as for their fairness, and that judges should not deliberate over rights and duties in the abstract but figure out what kind of incentives their rulings were putting in place. Now that law and economics has become part of the legal establishment, it does not seem strange when Posner talks in his opinions about markets as well as precedent. More recently, he has taken up what, in the hands of gentler souls like the philosopher Richard Rorty, is the tolerant anti-doctrine of pragmatism, and made it the underpinning for his career as a flamboyantly candid judicial activist.

... It came to seem to Posner as though economic efficiency were a hidden force that had driven law for centuries. Law had imagined that it stood above markets, imposing upon them its own notions of fairness and duty; but, all along, the pull of the market was stronger, shaping judges' ideas without their knowing it, and making economists of them while they thought they were in another business altogether.

His prolificness, faith in economic / scientific inquiry, and just plain old IQ and hard-work means he's written a TON (over 30 books) and, in some cases, about a lot of weird stuff:

...As Milton Friedman, the legendary Chicago economist, puts it, "He's a very brilliant fella and he's written on everything under God's green sun. What else do you want?"

...He relishes facts, the more obscure and Counterintuitive the better, but as rhetorical weapons rather than as data. His accounts of the world are sometimes so eccentric as to be almost Martian. He has argued, for instance, that a higher proportion of black women than white women are fat because the supply of eligible black men is limited; thus, black women find the likelihood of profit from an elegant figure too small to compensate for the costs of dieting.

Ok, so maybe I don't agree with everything he may have written  ;-)    But I have to admit a certain fondness for his style of inquiry.  

...In "Sex and Reason," Posner was interested in conscious sexual choices, but he is also committed to a theory of unconscious rationality: socio-biology. He is a thoroughgoing Darwinian, and believes that many of the social and moral ideas commonly held to be cultural are in fact traceable to the dictates of reproduction. He subscribes to the idea, for instance, that altruism derives from the evolutionary imperative to perpetuate one's genes by taking care of those who share them. This coheres nicely with his general economic approach. As he puts it, "Economic theory is closely related to the theory of evolution... . Evolution deals with unconscious maximizers, the genes; economics with conscious maximizers, persons.