Cass Sunstein
Cass Robert Sunstein is an American legal scholar known for his work in U.S. constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and behavioral economics. He is also The New York Times best-selling author of The World According to Star Wars and Nudge. He was the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2012.
Sunstein serves as the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. He was previously a professor at the University of Chicago Law School from 1981 to 2008. In 2014, studies of legal publications found Sunstein to be the most frequently cited American legal scholar by a wide margin.
Early life and education
Cass Robert Sunstein was born on September 21, 1954, in Salem, Massachusetts, to Marian, a teacher, and Cass Richard Sunstein, a builder. He has said that as a teenager, he was briefly infatuated with the works of Ayn Rand, "ut after about six weeks of enchantment, her books started to make me sick. Contemptuous toward most of humanity, merciless about human frailty, and constantly hammering on the moral evils of redistribution, they produced a sense of claustrophobia."Sunstein graduated from Middlesex School in 1972. He then went to Harvard University, where he was a member of the varsity squash team and an editor of the Harvard Lampoon. He graduated in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude. He then attended Harvard Law School, where he was an executive editor of the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review and was on the winning team of the Ames Moot Court Competition. He graduated in 1978 with a Juris Doctor, magna cum laude.
Career
After law school, Sunstein was a law clerk to Justice Benjamin Kaplan of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from 1978 to 1979 and to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1979 to 1980.After his clerkships, Sunstein spent one year as an attorney-advisor in the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. In 1981, he became an assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School, where he also became an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science. In 1985, Sunstein was made a full professor of both political science and law; in 1988, he was named the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence in the Law School and Department of Political Science. The university honored him in 1993 with its "distinguished service" accolade, permanently changing his title to Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence in the Law School and Department of Political Science. In 2009, Sunstein was described by fellow Chicago professor Douglas G. Baird as a "Chicago person through and through".
Sunstein was the Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School in the fall of 1986 and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in the spring 1987, winter 2005, and spring 2007 terms. He has taught courses in constitutional law, administrative law, and environmental law, as well as the required first-year course "Elements of the Law", which was an introduction to legal reasoning, legal theory, and the interdisciplinary study of law, including law and economics. In the fall of 2008, he joined the faculty of Harvard Law School and began serving as the director of its Program on Risk Regulation:
The Program on Risk Regulation will focus on how law and policy deal with the central hazards of the 21st century. Anticipated areas of study include terrorism, climate change, occupational safety, infectious diseases, natural disasters, and other low-probability, high-consequence events. Sunstein plans to rely on significant student involvement in the work of this new program.
On January 7, 2009, The Wall Street Journal reported that Sunstein would be named to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. That news generated controversy among progressive legal scholars and environmentalists. Sunstein's confirmation was long blocked because of controversy over allegations about his political and academic views. On September 9, 2009, the Senate voted for cloture on Sunstein's nomination as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Office of Management and Budget. The motion passed in a 63–35 vote. The Senate confirmed Sunstein on September 10, 2009, in a 57–40 vote.
In his research on risk regulation, Sunstein is known for developing, together with Timur Kuran, the concept of availability cascades, wherein popular discussion of an idea is self-feeding and causes individuals to over weigh its importance.
Sunstein's books include After the Rights Revolution, The Partial Constitution, Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech, Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict, Free Markets and Social Justice, One Case at a Time, Risk and Reason, Why Societies Need Dissent, Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle, Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America, Are Judges Political? An Empirical Analysis of the Federal Judiciary, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, and, co-authored with Richard Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
Sunstein's 2006 book, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, explores methods for aggregating information; it contains discussions of prediction markets, open-source software, and wikis. Sunstein's 2004 book, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever, advocates the Second Bill of Rights proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Among these rights are a right to an education, a right to a home, a right to health care, and a right to protection against monopolies; Sunstein argues that the Second Bill of Rights has had a large international impact and should be revived in the United States. His 2001 book, Republic.com, argued that the Internet may weaken democracy because it allows citizens to isolate themselves within groups that share their own views and experiences, and thus cut themselves off from any information that might challenge their beliefs, a phenomenon known as cyberbalkanization.
Sunstein co-authored Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness with economist Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago. Nudge discusses how public and private organizations can help people make better choices in their daily lives. Thaler and Sunstein argue that:
People often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself.
The ideas in the book proved popular with politicians such as U.S. President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and the British Conservative Party in general. The "Nudge" idea has also been criticized. Dr. Tammy Boyce, from public health foundation The King's Fund, has said:
We need to move away from short-term, politically motivated initiatives such as the 'nudging people' idea, which are not based on any good evidence and don't help people make long-term behavior changes.
Contributing to the anthology Our American Story, Sunstein addressed the possibility of a shared American narrative. He cited the concepts of self-government and equal dignity of human beings, but focused in particular on stories: "an emphasis on what happened before and after the firing shots in Concord and the courageous response of the embattled farmers maintains continuity with the historical facts and offers us something on which we can build."
Sunstein is a contributing editor to The New Republic and The American Prospect and is a frequent witness before congressional committees. He played an active role in opposing the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998.
In recent years, Sunstein has been a guest writer on The Volokh Conspiracy blog as well as the blogs of law professors Lawrence Lessig and Jack Balkin. He is considered so prolific a writer that in 2007, an article in the legal publication The Green Bag coined the concept of a "Sunstein number" reflecting degrees of separation between various legal authors and Sunstein, paralleling the Erdős numbers sometimes assigned to mathematician authors.
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute, and the American Philosophical Society. He received an Honorary Doctorate from Copenhagen Business School.
In February 2020, he wrote an article for Bloomberg titled "The Cognitive Bias That Makes Us Panic About Coronavirus". In it he claimed that "A lot more people are more scared than they have any reason to be" and that "Most people in North America and Europe do not need to worry much about the risk of contracting the disease. That's true even for people who are traveling to nations such as Italy that have seen outbreaks of the disease." He attributed the excessive perceived risk to probability neglect. At the time of publication, there were 68 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S., including one death, and approximately 1000 new daily cases worldwide, over 300 of which in Europe.
Sunstein joined the Department of Homeland Security in February 2021 as an advisor to the Biden administration on immigration policy.
Together with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony, Sunstein co-authored Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, which was published in May 2021. Drawing not least upon legal examples, it treats unwanted variability in human judgments of the same problem, for instance, when court judges recommend vastly different sentences for the same crimes. The book looks both at what 'noise in human judgment' is, how it can be detected, and how it can be reduced.
Since 2021, Sunstein has co-taught a class on the United States Supreme Court at Harvard alongside retired Justice Stephen Breyer.