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Nonetheless, there is no desire to ease up on finding judges who will turn the tide against liberal activism. The President has reached into academia to sign up some of the most powerful proponents of conservative views. One is Richard Posner, 44, who was appointed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals from the University of Chicago Law School. A champion of the free-market economic views of the Chicago school, he is a brilliant foe of much Government business regulation and of the nation's antitrust laws. To critics like Rob Warden, editor of Chicago Lawyer, "He's an intellectual bully. The other judges on the court are afraid of him." In one year on the job, Posner has written more opinions, often witty and concise, than some judges do in ten. Among Reagan's other star academic recruits to appeals courts: Ralph Winter, 47, of Yale Law School, a conservative expert in many legal areas; Antonin Scalia, 46, another Chicago law professor, who specialized in administrative law; as well as former Solicitor General Robert Bork, a longtime constitutional-law professor at Yale.
Such minds are among the least-known and most important assets of the Reagan revolution. His choices now account for less than one-seventh of the 656-judge federal bench. But if the current pace of judicial vacancies continues, he might be able to name more than half of the federal judiciary by the end of a second term. And he may also get to create his own majority in the Supreme Court, where five Justices are over 70, including its lone liberals, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall. On the evidence to date, his choices will be firmly conservative, and worse yet for liberals, they will be good at it. —By Bennett H. Beach. Reported by David S. Jackson/Washington