Sunstein’s False Claim that Scalia Was a Living Constitutionalist
In an essay forthcoming for the Harvard Law Review, Cass Sunstein argues that Justice Antonin Scalia was in many important opinions a practitioner of living constitutionalism, that is someone who...
View ArticleCass Sunstein on Star Wars
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Cass Sunstein has been blogging on his new book on the Star Wars movies. He loves them and finds a variety of things to say about them that are more serious than Star...
View ArticleDelegation, Unilateral Executive Authority and the Decline of Democracy
In a recent post, I discussed how Cass Sunstein argued, with the aid of the Star Wars saga, that delegation to the executive could be dangerous to democracy. While Posner and Vermeule contend that...
View ArticleCan Behavioral Economics Justify the Unbound Regulator?
“You must be the best judge of your own happiness.” Jane Austen said that, in Emma, but the statement is also a keystone principle of modern microeconomic theory, and it provides the epistemic...
View ArticleSunstein’s Critique of Originalism
In his most recent column, Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein criticizes originalism: But originalism is just one of many possible approaches to the Constitution. If it is taken seriously, there is a...
View ArticleWhy Originalism?
In a recent column criticizing originalists for putting politics over principle, Cass R. Sunstein described a common take on what motivates originalism: “Originalists have an honorable goal, which is...
View ArticleSunstein on Regulatory Reform
Few people who served in the Obama Administration or are professors at Harvard Law School praise the Trump Administration for anything, but Cass Sunstein is commending the Trump Executive Orders on...
View ArticleThe Constitution’s Elegant Nudge
The catchy phrase is as important in academic writing as it is in popular writing. In motivating their constitution-making stage in The Calculus of Consent, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock assumed...
View ArticleMoneyball Illustrates Efficient Markets, Not Behavioral Economics
Late last year Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, published The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds, about the collaboration between Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose work gave...
View ArticleThe House Has No Obligation to Impeach the President
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has recently stated that she does not favor impeaching President Trump. Some have questioned her position on the grounds that the President has committed high crimes or...
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