Aaron Director

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. Director attended Yale University, which his friend, artist Mark Rothko, also attended. He graduated in 1924 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, after three years of study. 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. where he combined his radicalism with a lifelong belief in classical liberalism. His sister, the economist Rose Director Friedman, married Milton Friedman in 1938. During World War II, he held positions in the War Department and the Department of Commerce. ==Academic career==

The Austrian economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, at the time a professor of economics at the London School of Economics, was close to Director. They met in England, and Director convinced the University of Chicago Press to publish Hayek's The Road to Serfdom in the United States as part of the so-called Free Market Study, which they and economist Henry Simons led. Luhnow also funded Director's University of Chicago salary for five years, a rare occurrence for the university. Rather than penning the great works of the Chicago school himself, he was, according to former University of Chicago Law School dean Paul Baird "a teacher of teachers." Director founded the Journal of Law & Economics in 1958, which he co-edited with Coase, that helped to unite the fields of law and economics with far-reaching influence. In 1962, he helped to found the Committee on a Free Society. Behind the law and economics movement lay the narrative of scientific consensus. The Chicago school was not the first group to show interest in empirical economics but they used the language of science as a strong rhetorical tool. Director viewed human nature deterministically so he argued that the law could be replaced by the scientific principles of economics through efficiency measurements. The reason he gave was: "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history." By 1964, Director students including Robert Bork were working on Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign. At that time, the Chicago school was not yet the dominant force in political discourse, but in ten years, it had gone from being "negligible" to being a significant opposition to the majority. In 1973, Bork was appointed as Solicitor General of the United States by President Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court had begun striking down antitrust legal precedents. In just two decades, Director and his students had brought the Chicago school from obscurity to a major intellectual force in American politics. After retiring from the University of Chicago Law School in 1965, Director relocated to California and took a position at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He died September 11, 2004, at his home in Los Altos Hills, California, ten days shy of his 103rd birthday. ==See also==