Cass Sunstein

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Cass Sunstein

Born 1954
Residence Chicago, Illinois (currently, Cambridge starting in fall 2008)
Nationality Flag of the United States United States
Education Harvard College, J.D. from Harvard Law School
Occupation law professor, author
Employers University of Chicago Law School (currently, Harvard starting in fall 2008)
Home town Concord, Massachusetts
Title professor
Partner Samantha Power
Website
http://home.uchicago.edu/~csunstei/

Cass R. Sunstein (born 1954) is a prominent law professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He will join the faculty of Harvard Law School in the fall of 2008.[1] He will continue to teach regularly at the University of Chicago as the Harry Kalven Visiting Professor.

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[edit] Early life and education

Sunstein was born in 1954. He graduated in 1972 from the Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts and in 1975 from Harvard College, where he was a member of the varsity squash team and a member of the board of editors of the Harvard Lampoon, with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Sunstein graduated in 1978 from Harvard Law School with a Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, where he was executive editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and part of the winning team of the Ames Moot Court Competition. He served as a law clerk first for Justice Benjamin Kaplan of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (1978-1979) and later clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court (1979-1980).

[edit] Career

Sunstein worked in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department as an Attorney-Advisor (1980-1981) and then became an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School (1981-1983). Sunstein later became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science as well (1983-1985). Sunstein was made a full professor in the Law School and Department of Political Science in 1985 and was named the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence in the Law School and Department of Political Science in 1988. He was given his current title of Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence, Law School and Department of Political Science in 1993. Sunstein has been a visiting professor of law at Columbia Law School (as the Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law, fall 1986), and at Harvard Law School (spring 1987, winter 2005, and spring 2007). He teaches courses in constitutional law, administrative law and environmental law, as well as a required first-year course titled "Elements of the Law" which is an introduction to legal reasoning, legal theory and interdisciplinary study of law, including law and economics. Starting in the Fall of 2008 he will join the faculty of Harvard Law School and director of the Program on Risk Regulation. [2] "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" [3]

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 discussed the Second Bill of Rights proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt proposed a right to an education, a right to a home, a right to health care, a right to protection against monopolies, and more; 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.

His books include After the Rights Revolution (1990), The Partial Constitution (1993), " Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech" (1995), 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? An Empirical Analysis of the Federal Judiciary (2005), and Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (2006).

Sunstein's most recent book is Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press 2008), which he co-authored 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. "People often make poor choices - and look back at them with bafflement!" Thaler and Sunstein write. "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 book's web page can be found at www.nudges.org [4], and the Nudge blog is at www.nudges.wordpress.com [5]

Sunstein is a contributing editor to The New Republic and The American Prospect and is a frequent witness before congressional committee. 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 fellow law professors Lawrence Lessig (Stanford) and Jack Balkin (Yale). 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 Erdos numbers sometimes assigned to mathematical authors.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1992) and the American Law Institute (since 1990).

[edit] Legal philosophy

Sunstein is a proponent of judicial minimalism, arguing that judges should focus primarily on deciding the case at hand, and avoid making sweeping changes to the law or decisions that have broad-reaching effects. He is generally thought to be liberal despite publicly supporting some of George W. Bush's judicial nominees, including Michael W. McConnell and John G. Roberts. Much of his work also brings behavioral economics to bear on law, suggesting that the "rational actor" model will sometimes produce an inadequate understanding of how people will respond to legal intervention.

In recent years Sunstein has collaborated with academics who have training in behavioral economics, most notably Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, and Christine M. Jolls, to show how the theoretical assumptions of law and economics should be modified by new empirical findings about how people actually behave.

Sunstein (along with his coauthor Richard Thaler) has elaborated the theory of "Libertarian Paternalism." In arguing for this theory, he counsels thinkers/academics/politicians to embrace the findings of behavioral economics as applied to law, maintaining freedom of choice while also steering people's decisions in directions that will make their lives go better.

[edit] Personal

In January 2008, Sunstein began dating the prominent foreign policy specialist Samantha Power whom he met while working on Illinois Democratic senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign.[6] Sunstein has a pet Rhodesian Ridgeback named Perry. During the Clinton impeachment hearings, Sunstein grew tired of appearing on news programs, and agreed to appear on Greta Van Susteren's CNN program only if he could bring Perry on the show with him; she agreed.

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Sunstein to join Harvard Law School faculty"
  2. ^ http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2008/02/19_sunstein.php
  3. ^ http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2008/02/19_sunstein.php
  4. ^ Nudge web page
  5. ^ Nudge blog
  6. ^ Cara Buckley. "A Monster of a Slip", The New York Times, 2008-03-16. Retrieved on 2008-03-16. 

[edit] External links