Posner: Faults Justices For Deciding Shakespeare Mock Trials, But Set To Hear Trial of Socrates

January 2nd, 2013

In March of 2011, Judge Posner made some waves for criticizing the Justices for hearing mock trials based on Shakespeare’s plays.

He says mock trials of fictitious characters don’t “contribute to anyone’s enlightenment.” For Judge Posner, the hobby symptomizes the broader ills of contemporary “celebrity culture.”

“That’s the problem with presidents and Supreme Court justices and billionaires. They think that because they are successful in one sphere they’re experts in everything,” Judge Posner says. Supreme Court justices should stop “preening” and return to “their dignified anonymity,” he says.

The ABA Journal reports that Judge Posner will preside over the trial of Socrates.

Star litigators in Chicago are preparing to retry a controversial 2,400-year-old free speech case that famously resulted in the death of Socrates, now considered the father of Greek philosophy, when he drank a cup of poisonous hemlock.

Dan Webb of Winston and Strawn and plaintiffs lawyer Robert A. Clifford, a former chair of the ABA Section of Litigation, will represent Socrates at the Jan. 31 proceeding, which is being held as a fundraiser by theNational Hellenic Museum in Chicago. The case for the City of Athens will be made by former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, now a partner at Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom, and Patrick M. Collins of Perkins Coie.

Judge Richard A. Posner of the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will head a three-judge panel that also includes his federal appeals court colleague William J. Bauer and Cook County Circuit Judge Anna Demacopoulos.

There you go.