Aaron Director

Aaron Director (; September 21, 1901 – September 11, 2004) was a Russian-born American economist and academic who played a central role in the development of law and economics and the Chicago school of economics. Director was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and together with his brother-in-law, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, Director influenced some of the next generation of jurists, including Robert Bork, Richard Posner, Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Early life and education Director was born to a Jewish family in Staryi Chortoryisk, Volhynian Governorate, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine) on September 21, 1901. In 1913, the 12-year-old Director and his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Portland, Oregon. In Portland, Director attended Lincoln High School where he edited the yearbook. Director had a difficult childhood in Portland, then a center of KKK and anti-communist hysteria in the wake of World War I. He encountered anti-Semitic slurs and was excluded from social circles. Director then attended Yale University, where his friend, artist Mark Rothko also attended. He graduated in 1924 with a Bachelor of Arts after three years of study. While at Yale, Director was influenced by Thorstein Veblen and H.L. Mencken, both elitist academics who believed the public lacked the intelligence to make democracy successful, and he eventually came to hold these views as well. He and Rothko anonymously published a satirical newspaper called the Saturday Evening Pest in which he wrote “the definition of the United States shall eternally be H. L. Mencken surrounded by 112,000,000 morons” and called for an "aristocracy of the mentally alert and curious". In 1926, he returned to Portland where he was hired to run and teach at the Portland Labor College. As a radical, his invitations to Communists and Wobblies created friction with the AFL craft unions which sponsored the College. In working with these radical groups, Director developed his sense that individuals, especially elites were better equipped to affect social change than government. The fall of 1927 he entered Graduate School at the University of Chicago with a fellow-ship, where he combined his radicalism to a lifelong libertarian/classical liberal ideology. His sister, the economist Rose Director Friedman, married Milton Friedman in 1938.