Cass Sunstein

"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."

Cass Robert Sunstein (born September 21, 1954) is an American legal scholar known for his work in constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and behavioral economics.

Sunstein was born on September 21, 1954, in Waban, Massachusetts, to Marian (née Goodrich), a teacher, and Cass Richard Sunstein, a builder, both Jewish.

He graduated in 1972 from Middlesex School.

He has said that as a teenager, he was briefly infatuated with the works of Ayn Rand, "[b]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 magna cum laude with a bachelor of arts from Harvard College in 1975.

At Harvard, he was a member of the varsity squash team and an editor of the Harvard Lampoon. In 1978, he graduated magna cum laude with a juris doctor from Harvard Law School, where he was executive editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and was a member of the winning team of the Ames Moot Court Competition.

After law school, Sunstein first clerked for Justice Benjamin Kaplan of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from 1978 to 1979, then for 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 (1981–1983), where he also became an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science (1983–1985).

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.

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 teaches courses in constitutional law, administrative law, and environmental law, as well as the required first-year course "Elements of the Law", which is an introduction to legal reasoning, legal theory, and the interdisciplinary study of law, including law and economics.

Sunstein's books include After the Rights Revolution (1990), The Partial Constitution (1993), Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech (1993), Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict (1996), Free Markets and Social Justice (1997), One Case at a Time (1999), Risk and Reason (2002), Why Societies Need Dissent (2003), Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (2005), Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America (2005), ''Are Judges Political?

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.

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'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.

An Empirical Analysis of the Federal Judiciary (2005), Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (2006), and, co-authored with Richard Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness'' (2008).

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.

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:

Sunstein co-authored Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press, 2008) 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.

He was the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2012.

As a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for 27 years, he wrote influential works on regulatory and constitutional law, among other topics.

Since leaving the White House, Sunstein has been the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School.

In 2009, Sunstein was described by fellow Chicago professor Douglas G. Baird as a "Chicago person through and through".

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 (OIRA).

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.

In 2014, studies of legal publications found Sunstein to be the most frequently cited American legal scholar by a wide margin.

He is also The New York Times best-selling author of The World According to Star Wars (2016) and Nudge (2008).