Cass Sunstein

An article by Cass Sunstein: The Supreme Court term that ended this week had a large number of high-profile cases. But many of its decisions involved the relatively technical field of administrative law, which sets out legal restrictions on the power of federal agencies. It has profound effects on people’s lives, and it is often the subject of intense judicial debates. The court’s most far-reaching ruling settled a long-disputed question: If an agency issues an ambiguous regulation – involving clean air, food safety or civil rights – who gets to sort out the ambiguity? The agency or a court?

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive and co-founder of Facebook Inc., endorsed federal privacy legislation and greater regulation of political advertising, even as he cast governments as too slow to address many of the internet’s thorniest problems. In an appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg said the company was racing to solve problems such as misinformation and how best to police online content. He expressed hope that governments would ultimately build a framework for tackling those matters....Speaking with Cass Sunstein, a Harvard professor and an occasional Facebook consultant, Mr. Zuckerberg expressed frustration both with calls to break up the company and with the U.S. government’s handling of Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election.

On stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mark Zuckerberg addressed a range of topics that have put the company in the center of a political firestorm, from election security to content moderation and monopolistic power. In conversation with Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, Zuckerberg said he wants to create more external standards so that private companies are not making morally complex decisions by themselves.

Mark Zuckerberg can't think of a single reason to break up Facebook, even as lawmakers call to dismantle or regulate major US tech platforms. In a conversation Wednesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Zuckerberg said being big is actually a benefit in the fight to prevent the spread of misinformation and deal with election interference. "The question that I think we have to grapple with is that breaking up these companies wouldn't make any of those problems better," Zuckerberg said in a conversation with Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein. "The amount that we're investing in safety and security is greater than the whole revenue of our company was earlier this decade when we went public, so it just would not have been possible to do the things we're doing at a smaller scale."

As public trust in Facebook’s ability to wield its power responsibly has fractured in the face of a series of privacy breaches and other scandals, the company has been facing fresh calls for regulation from numerous quarters of the federal government. But on one of the biggest issues leading to that breakdown of trust, its response to foreign election interference, Facebook has made significant progress, according to Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who made a rare public appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Wednesday...In a discussion with Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein, Zuckerberg invited regulators to set industrywide privacy standards and take a harder line with foreign interference in elections while pushing back against calls to break up Facebook.

It can often feel hopeless to be an activist seeking social change on an obscure issue where most people seem opposed or at best indifferent to you. But according to a new book by Professor Cass Sunstein, they shouldn’t despair. Large social changes are often abrupt and unexpected, arising in an environment of seeming public opposition. The Communist Revolution in Russia spread so swiftly it confounded even Lenin. Seventy years later the Soviet Union collapsed just as quickly and unpredictably. In the modern era we have gay marriage, #metoo and the Arab Spring, as well as nativism, Euroskepticism and Hindu nationalism. How can a society that so recently seemed to support the status quo bring about change in years, months, or even weeks?

An article by Cass Sunstein: The Office of Legal Counsel can be seen as the Navy Seals of the U.S. Department of Justice. It consists of a relatively small, and quite powerful, group of lawyers who provide legal advice to the president and the Cabinet departments, often on the very hardest questions. If the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security disagree about a legal issue, OLC, as it is called, might well be asked to settle their dispute. If the question is whether Congress can require the president of the United States to hand over his tax returns, or whether the president can fire members of the Federal Reserve Board, or whether executive privilege applies to conversations not involving the president personally, or whether the president is immune from criminal prosecution – well, there is a good chance that OLC will have the final word, at least within the executive branch. This helps explain why Robert Mueller deferred to a crucial judgment of the OLC, to the effect that the president is immune from criminal prosecution as a matter of constitutional law. The special counsel was criticized for following the office’s opinion, but he was right to do so. Robert Mueller is a straight shooter.

Many faculty members at HLS focus their research on aspects of consumer law and protection.

An article by Cass Sunstein:  If we are living through historic events, would we know? In 1965, Arthur Danto, a philosopher at Columbia University, argued that it is impossible to tell, when you’re in the midst of things, whether an event is going to be deemed “historic” by future historians. If something happens – Russia successfully reclaims Crimea, for example, or Pete Buttigieg declares that he’s running for president – its ultimate significance will be determined by causal chains that cannot possibly be anticipated, and by an assortment of events that have yet to take place.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein:  New Zealand’s Labour coalition government has done something that could prove historic. Led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, it has produced the world’s first “well-being” budget, focused explicitly on a single goal: using its limited funds to promote the well-being of its citizens.  Among other things, a lot of money will be devoted to three problems: mental illness, child poverty and family violence.

A book review by Samuel Moyn: Whenever I need to drive somewhere, I use Waze. The app saves me a lot of trouble, because it aggregates information to which I have no access and even plans how to distribute the traffic rationally to avoid clogging the roads. It has a lot of pop-up ads, but I try to ignore them because they seem a minor annoyance...But whatever its drawbacks, Waze marks a triumph for “navigability,” the ungainly term that Cass Sunstein uses in his new book, On Freedom, to describe how easy or difficult it is to get from here to there and, in the metaphorical sense, to achieve a goal once you’ve set one for yourself. For Sunstein, government ought to be more like Waze, helping people fulfill their desires and dreams, especially when they themselves are blocking that fulfillment. But any inquiry into navigability is inseparable from a much bigger theory of where our desires come from and how society fits them together not just with others’ but also into a common scheme of life. For too long, liberals have abstained from inquiring into what people want and have ignored how most obstructions come from neither the state nor the self but from a deregulated market and an unreformed society in which oppression is the rule.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Parody and satire are a legitimate part of public debate. Doctored videos are all over the place. Some are funny. Some are meant to make a point. Arguments of this kind are being made to support Facebook’s decision not to take down the doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in which she was made to appear drunk or otherwise impaired. One version, posted on the Facebook page Politics WatchDog, was seen over two million times in just a few days. There is no question that many viewers thought that the video was real. Acknowledging that it was fake, Facebook said, “We don’t have a policy that stipulates that the information you post on Facebook must be true.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Andrew Wheeler, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, recently released an important memorandum that makes terrific sense. In principle, it should improve the EPA’s performance -- and receive bipartisan applause. In practice? Well, that might be another story. The background is provided by two Supreme Court decisions. In 2009, the court ruled that whenever a congressional enactment is ambiguous, the EPA has the authority to consider the costs of its regulations and to weigh them against the benefits.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: The English language needs a word for what happens when a group of people, outraged by some real or imagined transgression, responds in a way that is disproportionate to the occasion, thus ruining the transgressor’s day, month, year or life. We might repurpose an old word: lapidation. Technically, the word is a synonym for stoning, but it sounds much less violent. It is also obscure, which makes it easier to enlist for contemporary purposes. For a recent example of lapidation, consider the case of Ronald Sullivan, a Harvard law professor who joined the team of lawyers defending Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein against charges of rape and sexual abuse.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: It’s increasingly clear that Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision protecting a woman’s right to choose abortion, is in jeopardy. But what is Roe all about? Privacy? Liberty? Women’s equality? Its survival may depend partly on the answer, so let’s go back to first principles. The Roe opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun in 1973, was entirely about privacy. As Blackmun put it, the right of privacy “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” For two reasons, that’s awkward. First, the U.S. Constitution does not protect a general right of privacy at all. Second, any right of privacy, if it does exist, would not seem to encompass the right to choose abortion. Privacy usually refers to the right to control access to personal information.1 What does abortion have to do with that?

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein; Human beings really don’t like to be guinea pigs. Many people are inclined to rebel if they learn that they are in some kind of experiment. For private companies and for governments, that’s a big problem. Randomized experiments, often known as “A/B tests,” are the best way for private companies and public officials to learn what they should be doing if they want to save money and even lives.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: President Donald Trump’s “protective assertion of executive privilege,” in response to a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee, is creating a great deal of confusion. To dispel it, we have to see the trees, not the forest. To do that, it is crucial to understand that the subpoena called not only for the unredacted version of the Mueller report, but also for “[a]ll documents referenced in the Report” and “[a]ll documents obtained and investigative materials created by the Special Counsel’s office.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Is President Donald Trump legally entitled to withhold his tax returns from the House Committee on Ways and Means? Probably not – but it’s not simple. The governing legal text, known as section 6103, is buried in a lengthy set of provisions governing confidentiality and disclosure of tax returns. ... Representative Richard Neal, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, invoked section 6103 on April 3, when he asked for Trump’s federal income tax returns for 2013 through 2018 – along with the returns for eight organizations owned by or associated with Trump. At first glance, section 6103 authorizes Neal to get those returns.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: If you are concerned about climate change, you are likely enthusiastic about renewable fuels, such as solar and wind, and about laws that require their use. For example, the Green New Deal calls for “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” Unfortunately, new research shows that renewable-fuel mandates are an unusually expensive way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The expense comes in the form of increased electricity prices, which are a particular problem for low-income consumers. A strong majority of states now have “renewable portfolio standards,” which require that a specified percentage of the electricity supply must come from renewables. In California, the 2030 target is 60 percent. In New York, it is 50 percent.