The sixth form at the boys' boarding school where I was educated was addressed on one occasion by an outside speaker, a sanctimonious pedagogue who announced to us that he and his wife – bootfaced on the platform beside him – had overcome sex. He counselled us to do the same. To an audience of overheated seventeen-year-olds whose only ambition was for sex to overcome them, the proposition was as mystifying as a book written by a judge and called Overcoming Law.

The judge in this case, Richard Posner, is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He is also a senior lecturer in law at Chicago University and a widely published polemicist. At the heart of his polemics are three pulses, legal pragmatism, Millian liberalism and legal economics, which Posner believes beat in sympathy.