Posner say that his decision the Indiana voter ID case was wrong

From Politico:

"Do you think that the court got this one wrong?" HuffPo's Mike Sacks asked. 

"Yes. Absolutely. And the problem is that there hadn’t been that much activity with voter identification," Posner said. "Maybe we should have been more imaginative….We weren’t really given strong indications that requiring additional voter identification would actually disfranchise people entitled to vote." 

Posner authored the 2-1 opinion in Crawford v. Marion County, which likely influenced the Supreme Court in its 6-3 decision upholding the statute in the same case. 

"There was a dissenting judge [on the appeals court panel], Judge Terence Evans, since deceased, and I think he was right," Posner said. "But at the time I thought what we were doing was right. It is interesting that the majority opinion was written by Justice [John Paul] Stevens, who is very liberal, more liberal than I was or am….  But I think we did not have enough information. And of course it illustrates the basic problem that I emphasize in [my new] book.  We judges and lawyers, we don’t know enough about the subject matters that we regulate, right? And that if the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently." . . .

Antonin Scalia calls Richard Posner a liar for his review of Scalia's new book

Calling Posner a "conservative" is really quite misleading.  I don't know that he was ever a conservative, but he surely is someone who disdains precedent.  Since Posner references Easterbrook's foreword to Scalia's book, I thought that I would mention that Easterbrook has personally commented to me that his voting record actually lines up more with Diane Woods (a Democrat appointee on the 7th Circuit) than it does with Posner.  Posner's review of Scalia's new book with Bryan Garner is very tough, some would argue mean, and Scalia argues is dishonest.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Monday escalated a war of words with a prominent appeals court judge, saying the judge lied in a recent criticism of Scalia's judicial philosophy. 

Scalia, 76, the longest-serving justice and a leading conservative on the court, said Judge Richard Posner, of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, lied in a review in August of a book co-authored by Scalia. 

In the review, Posner accused Scalia of deviating from his own strict, text-based approach to interpreting law when he struck down a District of Columbia handgun ban in 2008 by considering the legislative history behind the law. 

"To say that I used legislative history is simply, to put it bluntly, a lie," Scalia said in an interview with Reuters Editor-in-Chief Stephen Adler. 

Scalia and legal scholar Bryan Garner were discussing their new book, "Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts," published by West, a unit of Thomson Reuters. . . . 

Scalia fanned that debate on Monday, saying Posner was only able to make such an assertion because he was writing in a non-legal publication, The New Republic. "You can get away with it in The New Republic, I suppose, but not to a legal audience." . . .

Ed Whelan has a discussion of Posner's attacks on Scalia and Garner's book available here.  Garner also has a response here:

Most of Judge Posner’s criticisms of our research were founded on the assertion that the cases cited used, in their rationales, more than the single canon being illustrated. That would be a telling criticism if the purpose of the cases had been to show the authoritativeness of the canon. But that was not the purpose. In choosing cases, we wanted examples that (1) contained lively problems that could be readily explained without bogging down readers, and (2) involved discrete textual points. We were looking for interesting issues that would illustrate good textualism—through our explanations. All the canons discussed are well established and have been frequently applied; the examples are there merely to show how each particular canon works. That a given court considered other factors besides the canon is quite irrelevant to our purpose. Indeed, it would be very hard to find examples in which a single canon was the sole basis for the decision. . . .