Cass Sunstein

In recent weeks, a number of HLS faculty have weighed in on issues surrounding the fiscal cliff negotiations.

In October 1962, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Harvard Law School on “The Future of Integration.” It was six months before he would be imprisoned in a Birmingham jail, 10 months before the March on Washington, almost two years before the signing of the Civil Rights Act and almost six years before his assassination. “It may be that the law cannot make a man love me,” he said, “but it can keep him from lynching me.”

Cass Sunstein ’78, administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), will return to the Harvard Law School faculty as Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law following his planned departure in August from the Obama Administration, Dean Martha Minow announced today.

Here’s the scorecard: Bush: $3.4 billion. Clinton: $14 billion. Obama: $91.3 billion. These numbers represent the net monetary benefits of final, federal agency regulations issued through the third fiscal year of each of these administrations. They were presented to HLS students and faculty on March 26 by Cass R. Sunstein, former Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and current administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a department within the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. As administrator, Sunstein oversees the federal government’s entire regulatory process. He was on campus to discuss “New Directions in Regulatory Policy.”

In his essays, Samuel Moyn considers topics such as human rights and the Holocaust, international courts, and liberal internationalism. Skeptical of humanitarian justifications for intervention, he writes,“[H]uman rights history should turn away from ransacking the past as if it provided good support for the astonishingly specific international movement of the last few decades.”

The U.S. Senate voted yesterday to confirm Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein ’78 as administrator, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Office of Management and Budget.

This year, Harvard Law School alumni continued to make an impact in a variety of ways. Most notably, HLS alumni have filled the halls of…

The academic work of the Harvard Law School faculty is downloaded from the online database of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) more frequently than that of any other law school faculty, according to the popular law blog, Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports. Works by HLS faculty were downloaded 107,591 times during the period studied for the survey.

Intelligent minds have long differed on the U.S. Constitution’s role as a blueprint for democracy. Some see it as the sacrosanct product of an enlightened era, its text to be followed literally. Others say that the Constitution must be interpreted more generally in order to apply its principles to current times.

2008 was a prolific year for HLS scholars. Here is a roundup of this year’s faculty books.

Faced with important decisions about their lives, people often make pretty bad choices—choices they would not have made if they paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities, and complete self-control. To take just one example, many people never get around to joining their employer’s retirement savings plan, even when it is heavily subsidized.

The following article, "Disclosure Is the Best Kind of Credit Regulation," co-written by Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein '78 and University of Chicago Professor Richard Thaler, was published in the Wall Street Journal on August 13, 2008.

The following article, "Judicial Partisanship Awards," written by Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein '78, was published in the Washington Independent on July 31, 2008.

Consider the two most challenging environmental problems of our time—the depletion of the earth’s protective ozone layer, and global climate change. The first one, writes Cass Sunstein ’78, “has been essentially solved, whereas very little progress has been made on the second.”

Renowned legal scholar and political theorist Cass R. Sunstein '78 has accepted an offer to join the Harvard Law School faculty, Dean Elena Kagan '86 announced today. Sunstein, currently a tenured professor at the University of Chicago Law School, will begin teaching at HLS in the fall. He will also become director of the new Program on Risk Regulation.