After Posner retired from 7th Circuit, a grim diagnosis and a brewing battle

(Reuters) - When Judge Richard Posner, who remains the most-cited legal scholar on record, abruptly retired from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago in September 2017, the legal world was stunned.

What no one knew – or didn’t publicly say – was that about six months later, the prominent jurist, who was 78 at the time, received a “confirmed diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease,” according to a Feb. 22, 2022, letter from his attorney, Fischel Kahn partner Robert Kaufman to Brian Vukadinovich.

Posner’s mental state is now at issue in a dispute over unpaid wages with Vukadinovich, who was co-executive director the Posner Center of Justice for Pro Se’s, and who shared the letter with me.

The judge founded the short-lived center in early 2018 after quitting the bench, with a mission to aid people representing themselves in legal disputes.

Vukadinovich in a letter to the judge and a follow-up to Kaufman said he’s owed $170,000 for his work from February 2018 to the center’s closing in July 2019. Unless he receives payment, he said he is prepared to “proceed with formal litigation and seek appropriate damages in a court of law."

It’s a prospect that he takes little pleasure in, he told me. “I respect (Posner) to the highest degree,” he said. But Vukadinovich said he worked 60 hours a week, “night and day,” for the center, based on what he described as a “very, very solid” salary offer from the judge. “I never got paid anything.”

Kaufman via email said, “We have no comment” about Vukadinovich’s claim and his response. Posner’s son Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, did not respond to a request for comment.

In his letter to Vukadinovich, Kaufman rebuffed the demand for payment, writing that “we believe medical evidence will show that the judge did not have the legal capacity to enter into contracts in 2018.”

Posner “has long since been moved to a nursing facility,” he added.

In attempting to sort out the dispiriting end of Posner’s brilliant legal career – he was sometimes referred to as the “10th justice” of the U.S. Supreme Court – one thing is clear to me. He was trying to address what he identified as an enormous imbalance in our justice system in a visionary, even noble way.

Pro se (Latin “for oneself”) plaintiffs or defendants appear in more than one-third of all federal cases, according to statistics from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

Almost invariably, they lose, prevailing only 4% of the time as plaintiffs when facing off against lawyers, a University of Chicago law review article reported.

When Posner quit the 7th Circuit after nearly 36 years on the bench with a single day’s public notice, he told the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin that “I was not getting along with the other judges because I was (and am) very concerned about how the court treats pro se litigants, who I believe deserve a better shake.”

Two months before his exit, Posner in Slate magazine called for “a mandatory retirement for all judges at a fixed age, probably 80.”

RARE WIN

Vukadinovich is one of the few pro se’s who managed to win in court. A former high school shop teacher in Northern Indiana, he sued his employer in federal court after his job was terminated. After a five-day jury trial in 2016 against a team of veteran lawyers, he was awarded $204,000 in damages.

Vukadinovich told me that Posner reached out to him afterward and they “got to know each other.” He recalled meeting the judge for lunch at the private Standard Club in Chicago, where Posner was a member. “When he walked into the room, lawyers stood up. It was like he was royalty.”

On Feb. 25, 2018, the judge emailed Vukadinovich with an offer to share responsibility with him in running the center, which aimed to have representatives in all 50 states to provide pro bono legal help and behind-the-scenes advice to pro se litigants. About 80 lawyers and advisers quickly signed on.

“You would receive a substantial salary in the role I envisage for you, though I can't specify salary yet because the company has as yet no money. Within weeks or perhaps days, however, the company will be reorganized as a 501(c)(3),” Posner wrote, according to an email Vukadinovich forwarded to me.

“I ought to be able to raise more than $1 million through donations,” Posner continued. “I will not take any of it for myself, because my wife and I have ample savings and low expenses. I should be able to pay you at least $80,000 a year and I hope more.”

Vukadinovich told me he and the judge ultimately agreed upon a salary of $120,000 a year.

As it turned out, Posner found fundraising to be more difficult than expected. In his self-published 2018 book “Helping the Helpless: Justice for Pro Se's: A Company Handbook,” Posner wrote: “My efforts to obtain donations have been strenuous, and include requests sent to almost a hundred lawyers in Chicago, but have thus far yielded only a few fruits (none in the case of my requests to those lawyers!) — not nearly enough to meet the company’s needs.”

He described the center’s finances as “parlous. In fact, the company has virtually no money as yet.”

Kaufman in his letter to Vukadinovich wrote that “any contract for services to be rendered on behalf of the Posner Center would have been an obligation of the Posner Center, and not an individual obligation of the judge.”

Vukadinovich countered that “I have the utmost confidence that I will be able to show a jury that the obligation for payment for my services to Richard A. Posner were and are the obligation of Richard A. Posner.”

Jonathan Zell, who was co-executive director of the Posner Center alongside Vukadinovich, told me the nonprofit had $8,800 in its bank account when it closed and $8,000 in debts. He said he was never promised a salary.

Posner disclosed his Alzheimer’s diagnosis to the staff early on, Zell said. But the judge downplayed it. “He said the doctor showed him a CAT scan that showed he had Alzheimer’s, but that ‘It doesn’t affect me.’”

Zell added, “Of course it did.” Still, he said the judge, at least in the beginning, “could put on a good show” in friendly interactions.

Indeed, Posner continued to practice law in 2018. On May 14 of that year, he filed a brief in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of William Bond, a formerly pro se litigant whose lawsuit against the federal government alleging First Amendment violations had been dismissed.

Matthew Dowd of Dowd Scheffel in Washington, D.C., served as co-counsel, but Posner signed the 39-page filing. The duo asked the court to remand the case and allow Bond to file a second amended complaint, writing that pro se litigants “must not have the courthouse doors closed to them without a reasoned explanation.”

The appeal was unsuccessful.

“While I cannot comment on the current dispute, I can say that it was an honor and pleasure to work with Judge Posner on our 4th Circuit appeal,” Dowd told me. “I still believe our appeal had much merit.”

Posner himself in his 1996 book “Aging and Old Age” – one of more than 65 books and 3,300-plus judicial opinions that he authored – contemplated the “inexorable decline” of growing old.

“No one escapes the aging process,” Posner wrote. But, he added, “there is scope for rational debate over when decline sets in, how steep it is, how much variance there is among persons within particular age groups, and the degree to which the cognitive effects of aging may, up to a point anyway, be offset by experience of life.”

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.