People
Cass Sunstein
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Harvard Law School and Berkman Klein Center announce new initiative on Artificial Intelligence and the Law
July 17, 2023
Harvard Law School and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society have announced a new Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and the Law (IAIL), directed by Professors Oren Bar-Gill and Cass Sunstein.
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Harvard Law School faculty members are currently featured prominently on SSRN’s list of the 100 most-cited law school faculty in all fields.
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Not-so-innocent bystanders
March 13, 2023
Journalist Géraldine Schwarz shares the story of her grandparents who ‘followed the current’ in Nazi Germany.
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A Tingly Sensation
February 14, 2023
Professor Cass Sunstein, who has been cited as “one of the most wide-ranging, original, prolific, and influential scholars of our time," on the writing life
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On the bookshelf
December 13, 2022
This fall, Harvard Law School showcased the works of faculty, alums, and students at book events throughout the semester.
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Harvard Law School welcomes the LL.M. Class of 2021 to campus
November 2, 2022
Dean John F. Manning ’85 invited members of the LL.M. Class of 2021, whose LL.M. year was entirely virtual, to experience life on campus and connect with each other in person.
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Justice Stephen Breyer returns to Harvard Law School
July 2, 2022
Retired United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer ’64 is returning to Harvard Law School, where he will teach seminars and reading groups, write, and produce scholarship.
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Former President Donald Trump’s three U.S. Supreme Court appointees likely will be key to the fate of affirmative action in college admissions as the issue of race-conscious policies returns to the high court. ... Shortly after that ruling, for which Gorsuch was widely praised, Harvard Law’s Cass Sunstein warned that Gorsuch’s adherence to the “original public meaning” of legal texts “gives a real boost to opponents of affirmative action.” The key passage, Sunstein wrote, is where Gorsuch writes that to discriminate is to treat an “individual worse than others who are similarly situated,” and text means that the judge’s “focus should be on individuals, not groups.”
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In Memoriam: Lloyd L. Weinreb: 1936–2021
December 26, 2021
Described as one of the great figures in the history of Harvard Law School, Lloyd L. Weinreb ’62, a leading authority on criminal and copyright law, and an HLS professor for nearly a half-century, died Dec. 15, at the age of 85.
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On the bookshelf
November 30, 2021
Here are some of the latest from HLS authors to add to your reading list over the holiday break.
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You Can’t Nudge If You’ve Got Sludge
September 30, 2021
Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein is best known as co-author, with Nobelist Richard Thaler, of the multi-million selling book Nudge. The idea that the behaviors of citizens and employees can be steered in a way that is beneficial to them have taken root worldwide. Today, there are hundreds of behavioral science teams, often called “nudge units,” in governments and corporations around the world.
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Minow, Sunstein and Kennedy launch the inaugural issue of The American Journal of Law and Equality
September 22, 2021
This month saw the publication of the inaugural issue of The American Journal of Law and Equality, a project developed by three Harvard Law School professors in collaboration with MIT Press. The first issue features a variety of views from legal, academic and philosophical scholars, including its three editors and founders: 300th Anniversary University Professor Martha Minow; Michael R. Klein Professor of Law Randall L. Kennedy; and Robert Walmsley University Professor Cass R. Sunstein ‘78.
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‘We have to spend more time on the inequalities that are embedded in the law itself’
September 21, 2021
September 2021 saw the publication of the inaugural issue of The American Journal of Law and Equality, a project developed by Professors Martha Minow, Randall Kennedy, and Cass Sunstein, in collaboration with MIT Press.
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May is blooming with brand-new reads with a little something for everyone... ‘Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment’ by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein (available May 18): Ever wonder why people sometimes make such bad judgments? Nobel laureate, Princeton psychology professor and bestselling author Daniel Kahneman, along with Cass R. Sunstein, a legal scholar and Harvard law professor, and Olivier Sibony, an HEC Paris business professor, tackle that question and explore how variables of “noise,” akin to bias, affect errors in decision-making. The authors also offer ways to reduce noise and bias — important advice in today’s complicated world.
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Cass Sunstein is a public intellectual and provocateur—and he has been pondering a timely issue: public lying. A longtime Harvard law professor and an expert on behavioral economics, Sunstein has written a slew of books, including volumes on cost-benefit analysis, conspiracy theories, animal rights, authoritarianism in the United States, decision-making, and Star Wars. He was recently named senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security, where he will oversee the Biden administration’s rollback of Donald Trump’s policies. But right before he rejoined the federal government, he released his latest work: Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception. The book is certainly a product of the Trump era, a stretch in which the “former guy” made 30,583 false or misleading claims while serving as president, according to the Washington Post. All his lying kind of worked. Donald Trump was elected despite—or because—of his serial falsehood-flinging. He nearly won reelection after his tsunami of truth-trashing. And after the election, Trump promoted the Big Lie that victory had been stolen from him, and his crusade triggered an insurrectionist raid on the Capitol that threatened the certification of the electoral vote count. After all that—and after Trump’s misleading statements about the COVID-19 pandemic led to the preventable of deaths hundreds of thousands of Americans—Trump remains the leader of the Republican Party and a hero for tens of millions of Americans.
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Why humans believe most people are telling the truth — even when we’re told they’re lying
March 5, 2021
An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Why do people credit falsehoods? Why don’t they dismiss them? Here is a large part of the answer: Most of the time, we tend to believe other people. When they tell us things, we assume that they are telling the truth.To be sure, we consider some people untrustworthy, perhaps because they have so proved themselves; perhaps because they belong to a group that we think we should distrust. But on average, we trust people even when we should not. We pay too little attention to clear evidence that what is being said is false. We fail to discount for the circumstances. For instance, what if I said: In recent months, scientists have found that climate change is unlikely to be a serious problem. On balance, most people will be unaffected by it. People in the United States and Europe are unlikely to be affected at all. To be sure, there will be some harmful effects elsewhere, including Rwanda and South Africa, but even there, those effects will be small. Remarkably, most of the world’s population will be better off, because the world will be warmer. Actually that is false; I made it up. But if you’re like most people, that false statement might well linger in your memory, making you think, at least for a little while and in some part of your mind, that climate change isn’t a serious problem. (Sorry.)
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A journal dedicated to promoting ‘revolutionary law’
February 24, 2021
On its 55th anniversary, Harvard Law Today takes a look back at the founding of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.
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Kennedy, Minow, Sunstein found new American Journal of Law and Equality
February 23, 2021
Three Harvard Law School professors have teamed up with MIT Press to launch a new journal focused on issues of inequality.
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Since President Joe Biden took office in January, dozens of Harvard Law community members, including faculty and alumni, have been tapped to serve in high-profile positions in his administration
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The Free Speech Debate About Social Media Is Broken
February 8, 2021
An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: The U.S. Supreme Court is strongly committed to the “marketplace of ideas.” It tends to believe, in the words of Justice Louis Brandeis, that the remedy for falsehoods and fallacies is “more speech, not enforced silence.” If you believe that, you might also believe that if people lie about Covid-19, the 2020 presidential election, a politician, a journalist, a neighbor — or you or me — nothing can be done. Sure, you can answer with “counterspeech”: the truth. And that’s it. The problem is in many cases, counterspeech is ineffective. Lies lodge in the human mind. They are like cockroaches: You can’t quite get rid of them. This psychological reality raises serious questions about current constitutional understandings and also about the current practices of social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, in trying to stop falsehoods. Ironically, those understandings, and those practices, may themselves be based on a mistake of fact — something like misinformation. In United States v. Alvarez, decided in 2012, the Supreme Court appeared to rule that lies and lying are protected by the First Amendment. The court struck down a provision of the Stolen Valor Act, which makes it a federal crime if you claim, falsely, that you won the Congressional Medal of Honor. According to the court, that provision is unconstitutional; the government cannot punish that lie.
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Biden’s Faith in Behavioral Science Will Pay Off
February 3, 2021
An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: In the impressively detailed memorandum on “scientific integrity” that President Joe Biden recently released, one provision could easily escape notice. It’s an explicit endorsement of behavioral science — and it calls for much more of it. The provision requires the director of the Office of Management and Budget to produce, within 120 days, “guidance to improve agencies’ evidence-building plans and annual evaluation plans.” It calls out President Barack Obama’s Executive Order 13707, issued in 2015, which has guided the use of behavioral science by government officials. Biden’s memorandum instructs the OMB director to build on that order and to work toward better practices. According to the memorandum, those practices “might include use of pilot projects, randomized control trials, quantitative-survey research, and statistical analysis.” In general, the goal is to build on “approaches that may be informed by the social and behavioral sciences and data science.” There’s a strong signal here. Obama’s agencies, including his Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, used behavioral sciences to produce creative solutions to policy problems.