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Duped by Grand Expectations
The silver anniversary of the Great Society was last year, and perhaps the most remarkable feature of the retrospectives by the academic and media establishment was the hard feelings shown toward the...
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The 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...
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Moneyball Illustrates Efficient Markets, Not Behavioral Economics
David Lee/Shutterstock.comMany have the story of Moneyball wrong: it's not a story of systematic error but one of eliminating systematic error in a market.
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Let the Sunstein In
Watershed election presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt do not simply happen on election day. The significance of the election is played out in speeches that illuminate and in...
View ArticleFat, Stupid and in Debt
CURA Photography/Shutterstock.comIn the New York Review of Books, Cass Sunstein reviews Sarah Conly’s Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism, just out from Cambridge University Press. I...
View ArticleWas Justice Black the Most Overrated Justice? No way!
CURA Photography/Shutterstock.comCass Sunstein has a column arguing that Justice Hugo Black “who served from 1937 to 1971, is the court’s most overrated justice.” I strongly disagree with Sunstein...
View ArticleCass Sunstein Reviews Richard Epstein’s The Classical Liberal Constitution
CURA Photography/Shutterstock.comAt the New Republic, Cass Sunstein reviews Richard Epstein’s new book on the Constitution. I have a mixed reaction to Sunstein’s review, agreeing with parts but...
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It’s My Party. Cry If You Want To.
Professor Cass R. Sunstein has unearthed a new –ism: partyism, meaning an animus or aversive reaction to someone based solely on party membership. As in: “I don’t care if people think I’m a racist or...
View ArticleA Partyist Solution to Partyism
CURA Photography/Shutterstock.comCass Sunstein has offered a new solution to advance good governance in a time of partisanship—what he terms an age of “partyism.” Because a partisan world leads to...
View ArticleAgainst Judicial Minimalism
CURA Photography/Shutterstock.comAt the beginning of this term of the Supreme Court, Cass Sunstein has praised judicial minimalism. Professor Sunstein argues that the justices should decide cases as...
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The Judicial Necessity of Constitutional Choice
Cass Sunstein is among the country’s foremost legal scholars, distinguished by both his prodigious output and an interdisciplinary approach that draws on the insights of behavioral psychology,...
View ArticleSunstein’s False Claim that Scalia Was a Living Constitutionalist
CURA Photography/Shutterstock.comIn an essay forthcoming for the Harvard Law Review, Cass Sunstein argues that Justice Antonin Scalia was in many important opinions a practitioner of living...
View ArticleCass Sunstein on Star Wars
CURA Photography/Shutterstock.comOver 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...
View ArticleDelegation, Unilateral Executive Authority and the Decline of Democracy
CURA Photography/Shutterstock.comIn 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...
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Duped by Grand Expectations
The silver anniversary of the Great Society was last year, and perhaps the most remarkable feature of the retrospectives by the academic and media establishment was the hard feelings shown toward the...
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Can 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...
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Why 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...
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Sunstein’s Critique of Originalism
Former President Barack Obama talks with Cass Sunstein and Valerie Jarrett on West Executive Avenue between the West Wing of the White House and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, April 7, 2011...
View ArticleSunstein on Regulatory Reform
CURA Photography/Shutterstock.comFew 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...
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The 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...
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