“Viewpoint” host Eliot Spitzer sits down with federal Judge Richard Posner of Chicago’s Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to discuss his views on the 2008 financial crisis and the controversy surrounding how to interpret the Constitution — is it a living document or should we only care about what its framers originally intended?
Of the financial collapse, Posner, who was dubbed “the most influential federal judge outside the Supreme Court” by The New York Times, says: “I was an advocate of the deregulation movement, and I made — along with other, a lot of smarter people — made a fundamental mistake, which is that deregulation works fine in industries which do not pervade the economy in their consequences. The financial industry undergirds the entire economy, and if it is made riskier by deregulation and collapses … the entire economy freezes because it runs on credit.”
And of the Constitution, he argues against “originalism”: “[The Constitution's framers] made it almost impossible to amend the Constitution — not impossible, but almost impossible. And as a result of limited foresight of the framers and the difficulty of amendment, it has to be interpreted loosely, otherwise it becomes a straitjacket.”
To see more from Spitzer’s interview with Posner, click here.
