[1][2] Director was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and, together with his brother-in-law, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, influenced a number of jurists, including Robert Bork, Richard Posner, Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
[1] Director had a difficult childhood in Portland, which, at the time, was a center of anti-communist hysteria and KKK activity in the wake of World War I.
[5] In the fall of 1927, he began graduate study at the University of Chicago on a fellowship,[6] where he combined his radicalism with a lifelong belief in classical liberalism.
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.
During this period of the 1940s and 1950s, Director broke away from traditional conservative politics, instead combining it with the social skepticism he had learned from Veblen and Mencken and the elitism he developed in Portland.
[3] Director's appointment to the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in 1946 began a half-century of intellectual productivity, although his reluctance about publishing left few writings behind.
Two of the first converts to Director's neoliberal school were Friedman and George Stigler, scholars from the older, classically liberal Chicago conservative tradition.
From then on, Director served as the "ideological enforcer" of the new Chicago school with Friedman crafting the rhetoric and Stigler driving the economic vision.
Some of his students compared taking his antitrust or economics courses to a religious conversion with Nobel laureate Ronald Coase joking that “I regarded my role as that of Saint Paul to Aaron Director’s Christ.
Director viewed human nature deterministically so he argued that the law could be replaced by the scientific principles of economics through efficiency measurements.
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.