Фрэнк Истербрук: Биография американского судьи и юриста.

United States federal judge

Frank Hoover Easterbrook (born September 3, 1948) is an American lawyer and jurist who has served as a United States circuit judge of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit since 1985. He was the Seventh Circuit's chief judge from 2006 to 2013.

Easterbrook was born in Buffalo, New York, on September 3, 1948, the son of Vimy and George Easterbrook. His younger brothers are author Gregg Easterbrook and Neil Easterbrook, a professor at Texas Christian University. He attended Kenmore West High School in Tonawanda, New York. Easterbrook attended Swarthmore College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received his Bachelor of Arts degree with high honors in 1970. He then attended the University of Chicago Law School, where he was an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review along with future judge Douglas H. Ginsburg. He graduated in 1973 with a Juris Doctor and membership in the Order of the Coif.

After law school, Easterbrook clerked for judge Levin Hicks Campbell of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit from 1973 to 1974. He then joined the U. S. Solicitor General's office as an Assistant to the Solicitor General, and was promoted in 1978 to Deputy Solicitor General. The solicitor general at the time was Robert Bork, and Easterbrook has reminisced that when he joined the Solicitor General's office, "The Washington Post noted that around the same time the SG's Office had hired three lawyers either fresh from clerkships or lacking the customary appellate experience. None of us had clerked on the Supreme Court. The Post concluded that good lawyers were no longer willing to work for the Solicitor General and attributed this to Bork's role in firing Archibald Cox as Watergate special prosecutor. The paper thought that dark days lay ahead for the Office with a second rate staff. The three bottom of the barrel selections were Robert Reich (later Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration), Danny Boggs (future Chief Judge of the Sixth Circuit), and me." Easterbrook was considered "one of the very top advocates appearing before the Supreme Court in his days at the bar". Easterbrook joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in 1978 (and is still a senior lecturer there today). He was a principal at the economics consulting firm Compass Lexecon from 1980 until his judicial appointment. Easterbrook argued 20 cases before the Supreme Court while in the Solicitor General's office and in private practice, including several landmark antitrust cases.

In June 2009, Easterbrook wrote the decision in NRA v. City of Chicago holding that the Second Amendment, which protects the right to keep and bear arms, did not bind state governments. This allowed the City of Chicago to maintain its ban on purchasing and possessing handguns. This decision was later overturned by the Supreme Court in McDonald v. City of Chicago. In April 2015, Easterbrook wrote the decision in Friedman v. City of Highland Park holding that a city ordinance that generally prohibited the possession, sale or manufacture of semi automatic assault weapons and large capacity magazines did not violate the Second Amendment. In May 2023, Easterbrook put a hold on an injunction that had been issued against an Illinois assault weapon and magazine ban by a federal judge in southern Illinois. This allowed the ban on firearms and magazines to take effect across the state.

In December 2017, Easterbrook supported the 4–3 en banc decision to reverse an earlier federal magistrate judgment that a confession had been unlawfully coerced from 16 year old Brendan Dassey. On November 1, 2019, Easterbrook concurred in the denial of rehearing regarding an Indiana abortion law requiring parental notifications. A 3 judge panel had struck down the injunctions. Easterbrook, and Diane S. Sykes who joined him, were the deciding votes to deny en banc. Easterbrook in his concurrence called on the Supreme Court to hear the case, and also pointed out its parallels with June Medical Services v. Gee. On January 23, 2020, Easterbrook wrote a decision slamming the Justice Department for arguing that a previous decision by the Seventh Circuit in the same immigration case was wrongly decided and that the Board of Immigration Appeals could ignore the decision. Easterbrook wrote, "The Board [of Immigration Appeals] seemed to think that we had issued an advisory opinion, and that faced with a conflict between our views and those of the Attorney General it should follow the latter. Yet it should not be necessary to remind the Board, all of whose members are lawyers, that the 'judicial Power' under Article III of the Constitution is one to make conclusive decisions, not subject to disapproval or revision by another branch of government." The Court reversed the Board's decision and entered a judgment in favor of the plaintiff. Jorge Baez Sanchez v. Barr. On June 29, 2020, Easterbrook wrote the opinion to reinstate significant voting restrictions in Wisconsin, originally put into place when Republicans controlled all branches of state government early in the previous decade and which U. S. District Judge James Peterson had overturned on constitutional grounds in July 2016. Easterbrook wrote that even though the voting restrictions are discriminatory, it was purely based upon party affiliation (the areas most impacted are heavily Democratic leaning). His conclusion that this is acceptable relies on a 2019 US Supreme Court ruling that partisan manipulation of electoral districts was also acceptable. “The changes were made because of politics,” he wrote. “This record does not support a conclusion that the legislators who voted for the contested statutes cared about race; they cared about voters’ political preferences.” He added that Democratic lawmakers could retake control of the legislature and change the laws they objected to. Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin Madison, observed “This is an amazing conclusion that opens the doors to all kinds of partisan manipulation of election practices. It completely ignores the possibility that the party in charge might be able to alter the rules to keep itself in power, thus removing the ability of the opposing party to change the laws in the other direction.” The case was argued in 2017 and it was long a mystery why the court hadn't issued its ruling long before. Easterbrook's written opinion offered no explanation for the delay in delivering it until preparations for the 2020 national election cycle were just beginning, during the COVID 19 pandemic and in the most closely contested "battleground state" of the 2016 national election cycle. On August 2, 2021, Easterbrook wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Indiana University's requirement for students to get the COVID 19 vaccine. Ten days later, circuit justice Amy Coney Barrett left the decision in place, denying a motion to block the policy temporarily while the challengers sought review from the Supreme Court. A few months later in a similar case, the full Supreme Court likewise declined a request to block vaccine requirements for health care workers in Maine.

Easterbrook's academic work focuses on corporate law, particularly the 1996 book The Economic Structure of Corporate Law, which he coauthored with Daniel Fischel. Easterbrook's article, "The Proper Role of a Target's Management in Responding to a Tender Offer", 94 Harv. L. Rev. 1161 (1981) (also coauthored with Fischel) is the most heavily cited corporate law article in legal scholarship. Easterbrook has also written articles on antitrust law and judicial interpretation, including The Limits of Antitrust, 63 Tex. L. Rev. 1 (1984); Abstraction and Authority, 59 U. Chi. L. Rev. 349 (1992); Statutes' Domains, 50 U. Chi. L. Rev. 533 (1983); and Textualism and the Dead Hand, 66 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1119 (1998). Easterbrook also expressed his opinions about how US states compete with each other in the race to the bottom to win corporations, in " The Race for the Bottom in Corporate Governance", 95 Va. L. Rev. 685 (2009).