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Richard Allen Posner (; born January 11, 1939) is an American jurist and economist who was a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago from 1981 until 2017, and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He is a leading figure in the field of law and economics, and was identified by The Journal of Legal Studies as the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century. Posner is known for his scholarly range and for writing on topics outside of his primary field, law.

Posner rejects the concept of animal rights. He recognizes the philosophical force of arguments for animal rights, but maintains that human intuition about the paramount value of human life makes it impossible to accommodate an ethic of animal rights.  Posner engaged in a debate with the philosopher Peter Singer in 2001 at Slate magazine, in which Posner argued against restricting the use of animals for food and in scientific experimentation. He agreed that gratuitous cruelty to animals should be avoided, but contends that animal welfare should only be advanced where doing so provides a marginal benefit to society.  Posner argues that animal rights conflict with the moral relevance of humanity and that empathy for pain and suffering of animals does not supersede advancing society. He further argues that he trusts his moral intuition until it is shown to be wrong and that his moral intuition says that "it is wrong to give as much weight to a dog's pain as to an infant's pain." He further states that people whose opinions were changed by consideration of the ethics presented in Singer's book Animal Liberation failed to see the "radicalism of the ethical vision that powers [their] view on animals, an ethical vision that finds greater value in a healthy pig than in a profoundly retarded child, that commands inflicting a lesser pain on a human being to avert a greater pain to a dog, and that, provided only that a chimpanzee has 1 percent of the mental ability of a normal human being, would require the sacrifice of the human being to save 101 chimpanzees."  In a 2002 Yale Law Journal article, Posner again criticized animal rights. He also dismissed Gandhi's view that animal rights is consonant with a empathetic and moral society. He supported this conclusion by arguing that Hitler was a vegetarian and Nazi Germany had the most stringent animal-rights laws in history.
Richard Posner