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A federal appeals judge and University of Chicago law professor who did as much as anyone to found the law-and-economics movement, applying cost-benefit reasoning to fields from antitrust to tort law across nearly 40 books. Appointed to the Seventh Circuit by Ronald Reagan in 1981 and its chief judge from 1993 to 2000, he became the most-cited legal scholar of the twentieth century. Though generally identified as conservative, he wrote increasingly liberal rulings on same-sex marriage and abortion late in his tenure, and the 2008 financial crisis led him to publicly question free-market orthodoxy in A Failure of Capitalism.