Description: Posner talks about growing up in New York City during World War II.

Question: Who are you?

Transcript: Richard Posner. And I’m a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. New York City in the . . . during World War II? Well of course I was . . . I was just a small child obviously. I was aware of the war, and we lived on the eighth floor of an apartment on Central Park West, and my friend lived on the sixth floor. And I envied him because I thought if a bomb fell, you know, it would hit the eighth floor before it got to the sixth floor. I remember the news reels. New York has not actually changed much in its physical features or its crowdedness and so on. And we moved to Scarsdale in 1948 when I was nine, and I actually liked that a lot better. So I love to visit New York, but I don’t have any desire to live here.

Question: When did you know you wanted to pursue law?

Transcript: Well it’s all a series of accidents. My father was a lawyer, and law was kind of a residual choice for people who didn’t have strong occupational motivations. So when I was in college, I majored in English. And I gave some thought to going to graduate school and literature, but it didn’t appeal ultimately for a variety of reasons. So I just went to law school. And just a default option. I didn’t have any particular passion for law or anything like that. And . . . But in the ‘60s after I’d graduated and worked in Washington, I became interested in economic regulation, application of economics to law. And then when I started teaching at Stanford in 1968, I started meeting economists. And I came to Chicago the following year. So as far as my interests are concerned – the professional interests – they were determined mainly by engagement with economic cases in the ‘60s and then meeting economists.

Recorded on: 11/21/07