Cass Sunstein

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Democrats pride themselves on their commitment to science. Citing climate change, they contend that they are the party of truth, while Republicans are “denialists.” But with respect to genetically modified organisms, many Democrats seem indifferent to science, and to be practicing a denialism of their own -- perhaps more so than Republicans. What’s going on here?

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Here’s some excellent news on inequality: Measured from birth, the gap in life expectancy between rich and poor in the U.S. has been rapidly narrowing. It appears that a variety of policy initiatives, including those designed to promote children’s health and cut smoking, are actually working. These findings run counter to the widespread view that the economic gap increasingly means that the rich live longer while the poor don’t. That view has some solid research behind it: By some measures, rich people are indeed showing longevity gains, but in many parts of the country, poor people aren’t.

Former White House adviser on intelligence and communications technology, professor and founder of the program on behavior economics and public policy at Harvard Law School, and author of many serious books, Cass Sunstein is “as surprised as anyone” about the topic of his latest. “If you’d told me a year ago that I’d write a book about ‘Star Wars,’ ” he said, “I’d say it’s more likely that I’d become an astronaut or a poet.” The book — a wide-ranging and intimate look at the movies and their impact on society — came about after a friend suggested Sunstein introduce his son to the world of George Lucas. “He got completely hooked on the movies,” Sunstein said, “and I got entranced myself.” Enough so, he added, that he began researching them “with the same kind of, let’s say, obsessiveness, with which I had studied behavioral economics and cost-benefit analysis, and the thought of James Madison, and the founding of the US Constitution.”

Brian Leiter has updated his list of the most-cited law faculty. Here is his list of the 10 most-cited law faculty in the United States, 2010-14, led by Harvard’s Cass Sunstein. Following Sunstein are Erwin Chemerinsky (UC Irvine), Richard Epstein (NYU, Chicago), Eric Posner (Chicago), Mark Lemley (Stanford), William Eskridge Jr. (Yale), Mark Tushnet (Harvard), Akhil Amar (Yale), Bruce Ackerman (Yale) and Lawrence Lessig (Harvard). Interestingly, three of the top 10 are in their 70s, three are in their 60s, and four are only in their 50s.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Here’s the most important legal principle that you’ve probably never heard of: If a regulation issued by a government agency turns out to be ambiguous, the agency, not the court, gets to resolve the ambiguity. It’s called the Auer principle, after the 1977 Supreme Court decision that established it...For the past five years, the Auer principle has been under sustained assault from the conservative justices, who have argued that it is a violation of the separation of powers and an unacceptable aggrandizement of executive authority. Few people have noticed, but on Monday the court made it clear that Auer is going to be with us for the long time. For the next president -- whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump -- there’s a big reason to celebrate. The rest of us should be celebrating along with them.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Donald Trump is an iconic System 1 candidate -- more clearly so than any party nominee in at least sixty years. Hillary Clinton is an iconic System 2 candidate -- as clearly so as any party nominee in the same period. That distinction may well end up defining the general election. Let me explain. Psychologists, and most prominently Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, have distinguished between two ways of thinking -- fast and slow. Fast thinking is associated with the brain’s System 1: It is intuitive, quick, and sometimes emotional...System 2 is deliberative and reflective.

Learn about constitutional law, we will. Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein is best known for his influential scholarship on constitutional law and behavioral economics as well as his three-year stint as administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Obama. But his latest project has him venturing beyond the ivory tower into a subculture far, far away: Star Wars.

South Jersey truck driver Michael Fright plans to celebrate by watching the first six movies, back to back to back. Bucks County accountant Carl Cardozo will take the day off from work, going in search of collectible, newly-on-sale figures of Boba Fett. Harvard professor Cass Sunstein intends to travel to the purest planet in the galaxy, Dagobah - at least in his mind. "It's gorgeous there," he said. And he should know. On Wednesday, these fans will join thousands of others - film buffs, academics, nerds everywhere - to observe an unofficial but hugely popular national holiday: Star Wars Day. That's May 4, as in, May the Fourth be with you!...But why does the holiday exist? Why is there a day for Star Wars when there's no Jurassic Park Day? Or Hunger Games Day?"Because it's awesome, and full of mysteries, and fun, and because it is handed down from one generation to another," Sunstein said.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Do investors suffer from behavioral biases? New research demonstrates that they do: They think that a crash is far more likely than it actually is. After you read the newspaper, you might well overreact to bad news about the market -- and lose money as a result. The best explanation is that investors suffer from what behavioral scientists call the “availability heuristic,” which distorts people’s decisions in many domains. In their pathbreaking work on human behavior, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman found that people make judgments about probability by asking about which events come most readily to mind (and hence are cognitively “available”).

An op-ed by Peter R. Orszag & Cass R. Sunstein. The U.S. is supposed to be a nation of second chances, but for the 70 million Americans with a criminal record, we’re not doing such a great job. Even among those whose crimes were nonviolent and committed long ago, too many still bear a scarlet letter. So it's encouraging to see many states now moving to expunge or seal the records of nonviolent crimes that aren't repeated. The stigma from a drug or other offense, even one committed in young adulthood, can linger for decades. In one recent experiment, job applicants randomly assigned a criminal record were half as likely as other applicants to get an offer of employment or even an interview request.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein and Simon Hedlin. Consumers judge environmentally friendly goods and services on the basis of stereotypes, which often turn out to be wrong. As one might expect, green stereotypes are frequently positive, and lead people to perceive green goods as better than they actually are — but sometimes green stereotypes are negative, which producers and public officials ought to keep in mind as they try to nudge the market in a more sustainable direction.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Having spoken contemptuously about “New York values,” Senator Ted Cruz had a catastrophic election night in New York. So it’s fitting that just one day after the primary, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that Alexander Hamilton -- the founder of New York values -- will remain on the $10 bill. It’s also fitting that in the same week Hamilton, the musical, a joyful celebration of New York values, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Many conservatives contend that federal regulators have been running wild, especially under President Barack Obama. Objecting to “job-killing regulations,” they offer concrete proposals for reform: more cost-benefit analysis, elimination of unjustified mandates, and explicit congressional approval of expensive rules...By contrast, progressives have been pretty quiet. That changed recently, when Senator Elizabeth Warren delivered an important but widely overlooked speech last month, one offering an unmistakably progressive vision of regulatory reform. Warren sees the problem as one of capture by regulated interests, not overreach by regulation-happy bureaucrats.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. When it comes to discrimination, Americans pride ourselves on how far we’ve come. Racial segregation is history. Explicit sex discrimination is banned. Same-sex marriage is the law of the land. But amidst all the progress, the male-female wage gap persists, and it’s big. A new essay by Cornell economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn offers by far the most comprehensive and illuminating discussion to date of that gap. They find that for every dollar earned by a man working full time, women working full time earn about 79 cents. More alarming, the gap hasn’t closed much since 1990. Sex discrimination is probably a big part of the explanation.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Predicting the experience of his successor General Dwight Eisenhower, President Harry Truman said this: “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike -- it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.” Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have promised to get rid of a whole host of executive actions from the Barack Obama administration. (If the Republican convention produces a different nominee, expect similar promises.) But there’s good reason to doubt how much would happen if one of them wins. The principal reason is simple: the law.  

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. A good nudge is like a GPS device: A small, low-cost intervention that tells you how to get where you want to go -- and if you don’t like what it says, you're free to ignore it. But when, exactly, will people do that? A new study sheds important light on that question, by showing the clear limits of nudging. Improbably, this research is also good news: It shows that when people feel strongly, it’s not easy to influence them to make choices that they won’t like. The focus of this new research, as with much recent work on behavioral science, is on what people eat.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In the current era, it’s probably impossible to find a nonpartisan choice for the Supreme Court. But if you did a national search for one, hoping to find a judge’s judge, known above all for caution and humility, there’s a good chance that you’d settle on Merrick Garland...No one should doubt that in terms of the future arc of the law, replacing Antonin Scalia with Garland would greatly matter. But it’s important to see exactly why. Above all, he would be a stabilizing force on the court, promoting continuity rather than large-scale change.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Suppose that you think that Donald Trump would be a terrible presidential nominee and an even worse president, and you want to convince his supporters that you are right. What should you do? Behavioral science reveals why there’s no easy answer -- yet it also offers some clues about what might work. The most important findings involve the risk of “backfiring corrections.” A growing body of research demonstrates that when people’s convictions are firm, attempts to correct those views, with evidence, can make them firmer still. That should be a red flag for anyone who seeks to turn Republican voters against Trump.