Tripping through new scholarship in IP, I happened upon a citation to Arthur Leff’s book review of the first edition of Richard Posner’s Economic Analysis of Law. (The citation being: Arthur Leff, Economic Analysis of Law: Some Realism About Nominalism, 60 Va. L. Rev. 451 (1974).) Though it’s almost thirty years old, the piece reads like it could have been written yesterday — in its substance and especially in its style. Professor Leff buries the foundations of law-and-economics while praising them, in a manner we see all too rarely today in the law reviews. He is concise without being dry; erudite without being pompous. There is meat on the bones, yet the editors had the good grace to leave his wit intact. You really get a sense of the man behind the words.
It’s a model to aspire to.