zirconium

Posner spends significant firepower assailing The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. This compendium (The Chicago Manual of Style for lawyers) might seem an unworthy target. Yet he is excoriating not just the Bluebook, but also the substitution of style over substance it represents. When created in 1926, supposedly by the great appellate judge Henry Friendly, the manual was 26 pages. A recent edition spans 511 pages. Posner appears to believe that following the Bluebook is about as bad as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic -- and by reverse order of manufacture, no less. He casts the Bluebook as a neurotic reaction to external complexity; if you cannot control what is important, you make important what you can control. Posner notes that Friendly himself recommended that later editions be treated as the Greeks treated their unwanted progeny.

Beneath the great seal of the United States, Posner's chambers should have a crest of a mongoose, encircled with Kipling's dictum: "Run and Find Out."

[Posner's statement re an opinion he wrote on voter ID] has been interpreted as a recantation, yet it's less an admission of error than an admission of uncertainty. This is consistent with his general approach: to acknowledge complexity, vacuum up as many facts as possible and then do his best.