Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

Yet around the same time, a private meeting was held in Chicago that looks in retrospect an awful lot like a prime node of the conspiracy of the elite economic right committed to subverting democracy. Except it was not shadowy, because a transcript of their conversation was soon published in The University of Chicago Law Review. The group consisted of some of the principal founders of Law and Economics, the movement that was busy encoding the preferences of the economic right into the legal and judicial system. (Not present was Robert Bork’s Yale Law School pal Guido Calabresi, another founder of the movement who’d just become a federal appeals court judge appointed by…President Clinton.*2) This supremely august group of conservative legal scholars had assembled in a room at the law school for a conversation about all that their little group had accomplished during the previous couple of decades, and about what remained to be done in the future. The gathering had a distinctly celebratory air. One of the five, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker—whose mentor Milton Friedman considered him “the greatest social scientist” of the late twentieth century, and who was in turn a mentor to the junk bond felon Mike Milken—fretted that victory was not yet total. In particular, he was peeved by some new federal rules that made it a bit easier for employees who’d been fired or forced to quit to claim discrimination. But his fellow pioneer Richard Posner, a judge on the federa...