Earlier this year, former U.S. Atty. Dan Webb stood at the podium in the walnut-veneered courtroom of the 7th U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago and prepared to argue a vote-fraud lawsuit before three judges who glided silently to their chairs and sat down.
”May it please the court,” Webb began, only to stop, slack-jawed, as Judge Thomas Coffey fell off his chair and disappeared under the bench. As lawyers gaped, one of the other judges, Frank Easterbrook, turned to Webb.
”Dynamite opening, Mr. Webb,” declared Easterbrook. The courtroom erupted in laughter.
In the heady atmosphere of the 7th Circuit, an appellate federal court that oversees Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, Easterbrook is a man with a sense of humor who is described by some lawyers and law professors as
”brilliant . . . scholarly . . . imperious . . . hypertechnical.”
A conservative, Easterbrook, now 38, joined the court in 1985 as the youngest member of a federal appeals bench in the nation and one of the youngest ever on a federal appeals court.
He is a graduate of Swarthmore College and, in 1973, the University of Chicago Law School, and he still lives in Hyde Park. He is unmarried.
A former deputy U.S. solicitor, Easterbrook has had a meteoric career.
With one of his colleagues, Richard A. Posner, whose economic approach to the law causes considerable controversy in the legal world, he coauthored a book titled ”Antitrust: Cases, Economic Notes and Other Materials.”
According to Daniel Polsby, a Northwestern University law professor, Easterbrook has quieted the cries that he would be a ”Posner clone.”
”Frank Easterbrook is a very vigorous and interesting writer with a sense of ingenuity or playfulness about him that I find to be quite engaging,” Polsby said.
Easterbrook has squared off with Posner in several court opinions, including a ruling last March when an Easterbrook-led majority upheld the right of a former employee and stockholder of a securities firm to sue his employers for failing to tell him about negotiations to sell the firm before he quit.
In a dissenting opinion, Posner declared that employment at will was a concept that still was applicable, and that because the man had quit he had no viable position.
Easterbrook described Posner`s position as the ”so long, sucker” point of view.
Linda Hirshman, editor of a soon-to-be published 7th Circuit Symposium for the law review of the IIT Chicago Kent College of Law, characterized Easterbrook`s approach to the law as a ”sort of beady-eyed strict reading of the statutes. He has a very well-worked-out position about how legislatures function, what the court`s relationship to the legislature should be and what the court`s relationship to society should be.”
That view, said Hirshman, results in decisions that follow the letter of the law, rather than in decisions that attempt to fathom the intent of the lawmakers.
”He believes in the greatest possible room for private interests to organize themselves to make private decisions free from the government,”
Hirshman added.
Webb, who is now in private practice, said, ”Both Judges Easterbrook and Posner are legal scholars who . . . are very well respected by the leadership in the Reagan administration, and either one would be philosophically acceptable for appointment to the Supreme Court.”
Douglas Baird, professor of law at University of Chicago Law School, described Easterbrook as ”one of the most brilliant on the federal bench.”
No one would dispute that his knowledge of the law, his analytical mind, is second to none.”
