Cass Sunstein

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Republicans, including President-elect Donald Trump, have some eminently sensible proposals for regulatory reform. But the party is also pressing two terrible ideas, which seem to have a significant chance of being enacted in 2017. The irony is that both of them would be damaging to the Trump administration itself.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Democrats and progressives, you lost. You can fight President-elect Donald Trump, or you can join him. There will be time enough for fighting, but for now, I suggest that you join him -- at least on some of his high priority items. As it turns out, several of them are your priorities too.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The Donald Trump presidency, coupled with the new Congress, is likely to produce major changes in federal law. But for the Supreme Court, expect a surprising amount of continuity -- far more than conservatives hope and progressives fear. If, as expected, Trump is able to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, the court will look a lot like it did until Scalia died in February: four relative liberals (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor); two moderate conservatives (John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy); and three relative conservatives (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and the new justice).

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Employers, like most people, tend to trust their intuitions. But when employers decide whom to hire, they trust those intuitions far more than they should.

This year, Dorothy E. Roberts ’80, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a leading scholar on legal and biosocial theory, is…

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Donald Trump has taken a battering ram to longstanding political norms -- the unwritten conventions that make governance possible. But even before he decided to run for president, those norms were under assault. Immediately after the election, one of the most pressing questions will be how to restore them. To answer that question, let’s assume what philosophers call a “veil of ignorance.” If we didn’t know whether the president would be Democratic or Republican -- if it could turn out to be Clinton or Trump -- what are the minimal norms on which we might agree? Here are four suggestions.

The first line of Cass Sunstein’s latest book, The Ethics of Influence, announces: “We live in an age of psychology and behavioral economics—the behavioral sciences.” For Sunstein, a Harvard law professor and former Obama administration official, this is as momentous a statement as saying we live in an age of antibiotics, steam engines, or the Internet. But just saying that nudges are here to stay does not make it so. In fact, if their future were not in doubt, why the need for yet another book on the topic—and so soon after his Father’s Day-gift-ready book on Star Wars—arguing that they should be here to stay? Like the president he served, Sunstein is now focused on cementing his legacy.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: t’s hard to imagine a presidential election with higher stakes than the current one: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump offer radically different ideas about the country's direction, and many people believe that one or the other would be catastrophic. Yet new evidence raises the possibility that we will see an unusually low voter turnout.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Bob Dylan has surpassed Walt Whitman as the defining American artist, celebrating the capacity for self-invention as the highest form of freedom. “He not busy being born is busy dying,” Dylan sang, in “It’s All Right, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Reinventer of folk music, voice of the 1960s, blues singer, rock star, born-again Christian, champion of gospel, country singer, old-style crooner, and now winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Dylan has found a million different ways to say the same thing.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In one of the most stunning rulings in recent years on separation of powers, the prestigious federal court of appeals in Washington, DC, on Tuesday struck down the law creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- at least as the independent agency that Congress designed. To cure what it saw as a constitutional defect, the court ruled that the bureau’s head must not be independent of the president, but must serve at his pleasure and be subject to his complete control. It’s an appealing idea, elaborated with an unusual level of scholarship, clarity, and even passion. But as a matter of constitutional law, it’s a bit wild. The Supreme Court shouldn't accept it -- and probably won't.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. It can be easy and tempting, especially during a presidential campaign, to listen only to opinions that mirror and fortify one's own. That’s not ideal, because it eliminates learning and makes it impossible for people to understand what they dismiss as “the other side.” If you think that Barack Obama has been a terrific president (as I do) and that Hillary Clinton would be an excellent successor (as I also do), then you might want to consider the following books, to help you to understand why so many of your fellow citizens disagree with you:

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. “I'd like to buy a new boomerang please. Also, can you tell me how to throw the old one away?” Never mind whether you think that joke is funny. Do you think your best friend would like it? You might think you know the answer; after all, people like each other partly because they make each other laugh. At the very least, you might be confident that a mere machine, equipped with data about how other people react to jokes, couldn't do better than you in answering the question of what your best friend will find funny. If so, think again.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Why do so many Americans oppose immigration, and why has it become a central issue in the presidential campaign? A growing body of research suggests that the answer isn't economic anxiety, or concerns about public spending, or even general nationalism. It is more specific -- and more disturbing. The question of what drives anti-immigrant sentiment is put in sharp relief by an extensive report released last week by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report finds that immigration has positive effects on economic growth -- and doesn't hurt the employment or wages of native-born workers.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Last Wednesday was a historic day for behavioral science. The White House released the annual report of its Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. The U.K.’s Behavioural Insights Team released its own annual report on the same day. With the recent creation of similar teams in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and Qatar, the two reports deserve careful attention. Outlining dozens of initiatives, the reports offer two general lessons about uses of behavioral science by governments. First, both teams are enlisting behavioral science not for controversial purposes, but to encourage people to benefit from public programs and to comply with the law. Second, governments are constantly testing the tools to see whether they actually work.

Cass R. Sunstein, the Harvard Law polymath who annoyed business and activists in his three-year ride as Obama's White House regulatory chief and the author of The World According to Star Wars and heavier-thinking books, is a prescient student of our digital way of talking. As I noted in my 2004 book Comcasted, while Web evangelists were still idealizing online as the place to tie our world into one big friendly village, Sunstein worried it was ghettoizing into "echo chambers" where we avoid people we disagree with, sharpen prejudices, and abandon standards of evidence. Now, the professor (whose Philadelphia ancestors make him a cousin of Comcast boss Brian Roberts) is asking the question: Do we really want to read our leaders' emails?

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Last week was the 50th anniversary of “Star Trek” -- or more precisely, as my Bloomberg View colleague Stephen Carter notes, the airing of the first episode of the series. It’s not often that after a half-century, a television show sparks a national celebration (including a set of commemorative stamps from the U.S. Postal Service). What accounts for the series’ enduring appeal? The answer lies in its portrayal of experiences and societies that, by virtue of their radical differences from our own, allow us to see the most familiar things in a new light. That’s what the best science fiction does...With that point in mind, here’s an account of three iconic Star Trek episodes -- ones you’d show someone who wants to know what the fuss is about.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Last month, the University of Chicago appeared to pick sides in the latest iteration of America's culture wars. But it was really announcing just how silly those culture wars are -- and how to get past them. The school informed incoming students that its “commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called 'trigger warnings,' we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual 'safe spaces' where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own." Conservatives saw the letter as a political intervention, a courageous stand against “political correctness” -- as if the University of Chicago shared the concern of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and others about left-wing orthodoxy on campus, in the media and political debates. But the letter’s real lesson lies elsewhere. It’s a political intervention that doesn't involve contemporary political issues at all.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Almost immediately after a new administration takes office, it must decide on its approach to releasing information. In early 2017, incoming officials should mount an unprecedentedly aggressive transparency initiative -- above all, to disclose online, promptly and even automatically, the final products of their own fact-finding and policy-making processes. If you are skeptical about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, you will think that such an initiative is unlikely. But hear me out. It could well turn out to be appealing to both of them.

Harvard Law professors rank highest nationwide in the judicial impact of their legal scholarship, according to a new study examining citations of law review articles by U.S. high courts, but no women scholars across the country placed in the top 25. The study ranked the top 25 law professors according to the number of judicial citations their scholarly works receive, and Harvard Law School professors Richard H. Fallon, Cass R. Sunstein ’75, and John F. Manning ’82 claimed the top three spots...Fallon described the challenge law professors face in trying to bridge two groups—“practicing lawyers and judges” and “more theoretically minded professors and students”—whose interests often diverge. “I would like to think that we at Harvard Law School do a good job at keeping a foot successfully in both camps.”...Manning, who wrote in an email that he believes that judicial citations are not the most meaningful measure of scholarly impact, thinks that women should already rank higher. “By any reasonable measure of quality of legal scholarship (which citation counts capture only very imperfectly), there are certainly women who belong in the top 25,” he wrote.

Chief Justice John Roberts may not think much of legal scholarship coming out of the academy these days, but judges (or at least their clerks) do read law reviews. That much is apparent in a new study gauging the judicial impact of articles published in peer-reviewed and student-edited law journals. ...Below is the paper’s ranking of professors by judicial citations. The top three all come from Harvard law school: constitutional scholars Richard Fallon and Cass Sunstein and administrative law professor John Manning. UCLA professor and Washington Post legal blogger Eugene Volokh and Yale professor Akhil Amar follow right below them.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein...Which brings us to Donald Trump. No one should deny that Islamic terrorists want to kill Americans, and Trump is right to emphasize the need for careful screening procedures to keep Americans safe. But by branding his political opponents as in league with terrorists, and in calling for a new kind of Cold War, Trump is engaging in a form of 21st-century McCarthyism. In some ways, he’s outdoing McCarthy. The most alarming line in Trump’s national security speech this week has received far too little attention. It wasn’t his claim that we should admit only those people who “share our values.” Nor was it his vague proposal for a new “immigration screening test.” The most alarming line was his identification of “the common thread linking the major Islamic terrorist attacks that have recently occurred on our soil,” which turns out to be “that they have involved immigrants or the children of immigrants.”