As a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for 27 years, he wrote influential works on regulatory and constitutional law, among other topics.[3] Since leaving the White House, Sunstein has been the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School.[4] In 2014, studies of legal publications found Sunstein to be the most frequently cited American legal scholar by a wide margin.[5][6]
Sunstein was born on September 21, 1954, in Waban, Massachusetts, to Marian (née Goodrich), a teacher, and Cass Richard Sunstein, a builder, both Jewish.[1][7][8] He graduated in 1972 from Middlesex School. He has said that as a teenager, he was briefly infatuated with the works of Ayn Rand, "[b]ut after about six weeks of enchantment, her books started to make me sick. Contemptuous toward most of humanity, merciless about human frailty, and constantly hammering on the moral evils of redistribution, they produced a sense of claustrophobia."[9][non-primary source needed]
After his clerkships, Sunstein spent one year as an attorney-advisor in the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. In 1981, he became an assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School (1981–1983), where he also became an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science (1983–1985). In 1985, Sunstein was made a full professor of both political science and law; in 1988, he was named the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence in the Law School and Department of Political Science. The university honored him in 1993 with its "distinguished service" accolade, permanently changing his title to Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence in the Law School and Department of Political Science. In 2009, Sunstein was described by fellow Chicago professor Douglas G. Baird as a "Chicago person through and through".[11]
Sunstein was the Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School in the fall of 1986 and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in the spring 1987, winter 2005, and spring 2007 terms. He has taught courses in constitutional law, administrative law, and environmental law, as well as the required first-year course "Elements of the Law", which was an introduction to legal reasoning, legal theory, and the interdisciplinary study of law, including law and economics. In the fall of 2008, he joined the faculty of Harvard Law School and began serving as the director of its Program on Risk Regulation:[12]
The Program on Risk Regulation will focus on how law and policy deal with the central hazards of the 21st century. Anticipated areas of study include terrorism, climate change, occupational safety, infectious diseases, natural disasters, and other low-probability, high-consequence events. Sunstein plans to rely on significant student involvement in the work of this new program.[12]
On January 7, 2009, The Wall Street Journal reported that Sunstein would be named to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).[13] That news generated controversy among progressive legal scholars[14] and environmentalists.[15] Sunstein's confirmation was long blocked because of controversy over allegations about his political and academic views. On September 9, 2009, the Senate voted for cloture[16] on Sunstein's nomination as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Office of Management and Budget. The motion passed in a 63–35 vote. The Senate confirmed Sunstein on September 10, 2009, in a 57–40 vote.
In his research on risk regulation, Sunstein is known for developing, together with Timur Kuran, the concept of availability cascades, wherein popular discussion of an idea is self-feeding and causes individuals to over weigh its importance.
Sunstein's books include After the Rights Revolution (1990), The Partial Constitution (1993), Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech (1993), Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict (1996), Free Markets and Social Justice (1997), One Case at a Time (1999), Risk and Reason (2002), Why Societies Need Dissent (2003), Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (2005), Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America (2005), Are Judges Political? An Empirical Analysis of the Federal Judiciary (2005), Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (2006), and, co-authored with Richard Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008).
Sunstein's 2006 book, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, explores methods for aggregating information; it contains discussions of prediction markets, open-source software, and wikis. Sunstein's 2004 book, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever, advocates the Second Bill of Rights proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Among these rights are a right to an education, a right to a home, a right to health care, and a right to protection against monopolies; Sunstein argues that the Second Bill of Rights has had a large international impact and should be revived in the United States. His 2001 book, Republic.com, argued that the Internet may weaken democracy because it allows citizens to isolate themselves within groups that share their own views and experiences, and thus cut themselves off from any information that might challenge their beliefs, a phenomenon known as cyberbalkanization.
Sunstein co-authored Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press, 2008) with economist Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago. Nudge discusses how public and private organizations can help people make better choices in their daily lives. Thaler and Sunstein argue that:
People often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself.[citation needed]
We need to move away from short-term, politically motivated initiatives such as the 'nudging people' idea, which are not based on any good evidence and don't help people make long-term behavior changes.[20]
Contributing to the anthology Our American Story (2019), Sunstein addressed the possibility of a shared American narrative. He cited the concepts of self-government and equal dignity of human beings, but focused in particular on stories: "an emphasis on what happened before and after the firing shots in Concord and the courageous response of the embattled farmers maintains continuity with the historical facts and offers us something on which we can build."[21]
In February 2020, he wrote an article for Bloomberg titled "The Cognitive Bias That Makes Us Panic About Coronavirus".[25] In it he claimed that "A lot more people are more scared than they have any reason to be" and that "Most people in North America and Europe do not need to worry much about the risk of contracting the disease. That's true even for people who are traveling to nations such as Italy that have seen outbreaks of the disease." He attributed the excessive perceived risk to probability neglect. At time of publication, there have been 68 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S., including one death, and approximately 1000 new daily cases worldwide, over 300 of which in Europe.[26]
Together with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony, Sunstein co-authored Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, which was published in May 2021. Drawing not least upon legal examples, it treats of unwanted variability in human judgments of the same problem, for instance when court judges recommend vastly different sentences for the same crimes. The book looks both at what 'noise in human judgment' is, how it can be detected and how it can be reduced.
Since 2021, Sunstein has co-taught a class on the United States Supreme Court at Harvard alongside retired Justice Stephen Breyer. [28]
Sunstein is a proponent of judicial minimalism, arguing that judges should focus primarily on deciding the case at hand, and avoid making sweeping changes to the law or decisions that have broad-reaching effects. Some view him as liberal,[29] despite Sunstein's public support for George W. Bush's judicial nominees Michael W. McConnell and John G. Roberts,[30] as well as providing strongly maintained theoretical support for the death penalty.[31] Conservative libertarian legal scholar Richard A. Epstein described Sunstein as "one of the more conservative players in the Obama administration."[32]
Much of his work also brings behavioral economics to bear on law, suggesting that the "rational actor" model will sometimes produce an inadequate understanding of how people will respond to legal intervention.
According to Sunstein, the interpretation of federal law should be made not by judges but by the beliefs and commitments of the U.S. president and those around him. "There is no reason to believe that in the face of statutory ambiguity, the meaning of federal law should be settled by the inclinations and predispositions of federal judges. The outcome should instead depend on the commitments and beliefs of the President and those who operate under him," argued Sunstein.[33]
Sunstein (along with his coauthor Richard Thaler) has elaborated the theory of libertarian paternalism. In arguing for this theory, he counsels thinkers/academics/politicians to embrace the findings of behavioral economics as applied to law, maintaining freedom of choice while also steering peoples' decisions in directions that will make their lives go better. With Thaler, he coined the term "choice architect."[34]
Military commissions
In 2002, at the height of controversy over Bush's creation of military commissions without congressional approval, Sunstein stepped forward to insist, "Under existing law, President George W. Bush has the legal authority to use military commissions" and that "President Bush's choice stands on firm legal ground." Sunstein scorned as "ludicrous" an argument from law professor George P. Fletcher, who believed that the Supreme Court would find Bush's military commissions without any legal basis.[35] In 2006, the Supreme Court found the tribunals illegal in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in a 5–3 vote.
First Amendment
In his book Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech Sunstein says there is a need to reformulate First Amendment law. He thinks that the current formulation, based on Justice Holmes' conception of free speech as a marketplace, "disserves the aspirations of those who wrote America's founding document."[36] The purpose of this reformulation would be to "reinvigorate processes of democratic deliberation, by ensuring greater attention to public issues and greater diversity of views."[37] He is concerned by the present "situation in which like-minded people speak or listen mostly to one another,"[38] and thinks that in "light of astonishing economic and technological changes, we must doubt whether, as interpreted, the constitutional guarantee of free speech is adequately serving democratic goals."[39] He proposes a "New Deal for speech [that] would draw on Justice Brandeis' insistence on the role of free speech in promoting political deliberation and citizenship."[37]
Animal rights
Some of Sunstein's work has addressed the question of animal rights, as he co-authored a book dealing with the subject, has written papers on it, and was an invited speaker at "Facing Animals", an event at Harvard University described as "a groundbreaking panel on animals in ethics and the law."[40] "Every reasonable person believes in animal rights," he says, continuing that "we might conclude that certain practices cannot be defended and should not be allowed to continue, if, in practice, mere regulation will inevitably be insufficient – and if, in practice, mere regulation will ensure that the level of animal suffering will remain very high."[41]
Sunstein's views on animal rights generated controversy when Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) blocked his appointment to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs by Obama. Chambliss objected to the introduction of Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, a volume edited by Sunstein and his then-companion Martha Nussbaum. On page 11 of the introduction, during a philosophical discussion about whether animals should be thought of as owned by humans, Sunstein notes that personhood need not be conferred upon an animal in order to grant it various legal protections against abuse or cruelty, even including legal standing for suit. For example, under current law, if someone saw their neighbor beating a dog, they cannot sue for animal cruelty because they do not have legal standing to do so. Sunstein suggests that granting standing to animals, actionable by other parties, could decrease animal cruelty by increasing the likelihood that animal abuse will be punished.
Taxation
Sunstein has argued, "We should celebrate tax day."[42] Sunstein argues that since government (in the form of police, fire departments, insured banks, and courts) protects and preserves property and liberty, individuals should happily finance it with their tax dollars:
In what sense is the money in our pockets and bank accounts fully 'ours'? Did we earn it by our own autonomous efforts? Could we have inherited it without the assistance of probate courts? Do we save it without the support of bank regulators? Could we spend it if there were no public officials to coordinate the efforts and pool the resources of the community in which we live? Without taxes, there would be no liberty. Without taxes there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth defending. [It is] a dim fiction that some people enjoy and exercise their rights without placing any burden whatsoever on the public... There is no liberty without dependency.[42]
Sunstein goes on to say:
If government could not intervene effectively, none of the individual rights to which Americans have become accustomed could be reliably protected.... This is why the overused distinction between "negative" and "positive" rights makes little sense. Rights to private property, freedom of speech, immunity from police abuse, contractual liberty, free exercise of religion – just as much as rights to Social Security, Medicare and food stamps – are taxpayer-funded and government-managed social services designed to improve collective and individual well-being.[42]
Marriage
In Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Sunstein proposes that government recognition of marriage be discontinued. "Under our proposal, the word marriage would no longer appear in any laws, and marriage licenses would no longer be offered or recognized by any level of government," argues Sunstein. He continues, "the only legal status states would confer on couples would be a civil union, which would be a domestic partnership agreement between any two people." He goes on further, "Governments would not be asked to endorse any particular relationships by conferring on them the term marriage," and refers to state-recognized marriage as an "official license scheme".[34] Sunstein addressed the Senate on July 11, 1996, advising against the Defense of Marriage Act.[43]
"Conspiracy Theories" and government infiltration
Sunstein co-authored a 2008 paper with Adrian Vermeule, titled "Conspiracy Theories", dealing with the risks and possible government responses to conspiracy theories resulting from "cascades" of faulty information within groups that may ultimately lead to violence. In this article they wrote, "The existence of both domestic and foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the government's antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be." They go on to propose that, "the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups",[44] where they suggest, among other tactics, "Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action."[44] They refer, several times, to groups that promote the view that the US Government was responsible or complicit in the September 11 attacks as "extremist groups". The authors declare that there are five hypothetical responses a government can take toward conspiracy theories: "We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help." However, the authors advocate that each "instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5)."
Sunstein and Vermeule also analyze the practice of recruiting "nongovernmental officials"; they suggest that "government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes," further warning that "too close a connection will be self-defeating if it is exposed."[44] Sunstein and Vermeule argue that the practice of enlisting non-government officials, "might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts." This position has been criticized by some commentators[45][46] who argue that it would violate prohibitions on government propaganda aimed at domestic citizens.[47] Sunstein and Vermeule's proposed infiltrations have also been met by sharply critical scholarly responses.[48][49][50][51][52]
Personal life
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Sunstein was married to Lisa Ruddick, whom he met when both were undergraduates at Harvard.[53] She is associate professor emerita of English at the University of Chicago, specializing in British modernism.[54] Their marriage ended in divorce. Their daughter Ellyn is a journalist and photographer.[55] Thereafter, Sunstein dated Martha Nussbaum for almost a decade.[56] Nussbaum is a philosopher, classicist, and professor of law at the University of Chicago.[57]
In 2018 he was awarded the Holberg Prize for having "reshaped our understanding of the relationship between the modern regulatory state and constitutional law. He is widely regarded as the leading scholar of administrative law in the U.S., and he is by far the most cited legal scholar in the United States and probably the world."[65]
Sunstein, Cass R. (2002). The Cost-Benefit State: The Future of Regulatory Protection. Chicago, Illinois: American Bar Association. ISBN978-1-59031-054-0.
Translation: Sunstein, Cass R. (2006). Riesgo y razón. Seguridad, ley y medioambiente (in Spanish). Buenos Aires Madrid: Katz Editores. ISBN978-84-609-8350-7.
Sunstein, Cass R.; Nussbaum, Martha (2004). Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-530510-4.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2005). The Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0-521-61512-9. (based on the Seeley Lectures 2004 at Cambridge University)
Translation: Sunstein, Cass R. (2009). Leyes de miedo: Más allá del principio de precaución (in Spanish). Buenos Aires Madrid: Katz Editores. ISBN978-84-96859-61-6.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2006). The Second Bill of Rights: Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever. New York: Basic Books. ISBN978-0-465-08333-6.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2006). Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-534067-9.
Sunstein, Cass R.; Schkade, David; Ellman, Lisa; Sawicki, Andres (2006). Are Judges Political? An Empirical Investigation of the Federal Judiciary. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. ISBN978-0-8157-8234-6.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2007). Republic.com 2.0. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN978-0-691-13356-0.
Translation: Un pequeño empujón (in Spanish). Barcelona: Taurus. 2009. ISBN978-607-31-6206-7.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2009). Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-975412-0.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2009). On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN978-0-691-16250-8.
2010 onwards
Sunstein, Cass R. (2010). Law and Happiness. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN978-0-226-67600-5.
Sunstein, Cass R.; Breyer, Stephen G.; Stewart, Richard B.; Vermeule, Adrian; Herz, Michael (2011). Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy: Problems, Text, and Cases (7thed.). New York: Wolters Kluwer Law & Business. ISBN978-0-7355-8744-1.
Sunstein, Cass R.; Hastie, Reid (2014). Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter. Harvard: Harvard Business Review Press. ISBN978-1-4221-2299-0.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2014). Why Nudge?: The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism (The Storrs Lectures Series). Yale University Press. ISBN978-0-300-19786-0.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2016). The World According to Star Wars. New York: Dey Street Books. ISBN978-0-06-248422-2.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2016). The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-1-10-714070-7.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2017). Human Agency and Behavioral Economics: Nudging Fast and Slow. Palgrave Advances in Behavioral Economics. ISBN978-3-319-55806-6. OCLC1049592088.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2017). Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide. Harvard University Press. ISBN978-0-674-98379-3.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2023). Decisions about Decisions: Practical Reason in Ordinary Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2024). How to Become Famous: Lost Einsteins, Forgotten Superstars, and How the Beatles Came to Be. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.
Sharot, Tali; Sunstein, Cass R. (2024). Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There. Atria/One Signal. ISBN978-1-6680-0820-1.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2024). Campus Free Speech: A Pocket Guide. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sunstein, Cass R. (2024). Climate Justice: What Rich Nations Owe the World–And the Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Behavioral economics is the study of the psychological factors involved in the decisions of individuals or institutions, and how these decisions deviate from those implied by traditional economic theory.
Richard Allen Epstein is an American legal scholar known for his writings on torts, contracts, property rights, law and economics, classical liberalism, and libertarianism. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University and the director of the Classical Liberal Institute. He also serves as the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and as a senior lecturer and the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Chicago.
The University of Chicago Law School is the law school of the University of Chicago, a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. It employs more than 180 full-time and part-time faculty and hosts more than 600 students in its Juris Doctor program, while also offering the Master of Laws, Master of Studies in Law and Doctor of Juridical Science degrees in law.
Richard H. Thaler is an American economist and the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. In 2015, Thaler was president of the American Economic Association.
Stephen Fain Williams was an American lawyer and jurist who was a U.S. circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1986 until his death from COVID-19 in 2020.
Constitution in Exile is a controversial term that refers to the situation resulting from provisions of the United States Constitution allegedly not having been enforced according to their "original intent" or "original meaning". Some originalists might argue, for example, that the Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper Clause do not authorize economic legislation dating back to the New Deal.
Jeremy Waldron is a New Zealand legal philosopher. He holds a University Professorship at the New York University School of Law, is affiliated with the New York University Department of Philosophy, and was formerly the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford University. Waldron also holds an adjunct professorship at Victoria University of Wellington. Waldron is regarded as one of the world's leading legal and political philosophers.
Libertarian paternalism is the idea that it is both possible and legitimate for private and public institutions to affect behavior while also respecting freedom of choice, as well as the implementation of that idea. The term was coined by behavioral economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein in a 2003 article in the American Economic Review. The authors further elaborated upon their ideas in a more in-depth article published in the University of Chicago Law Review that same year. They propose that libertarian paternalism is paternalism in the sense that "it tries to influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves" ; note and consider, the concept paternalism specifically requires a restriction of choice. It is libertarian in the sense that it aims to ensure that "people should be free to opt out of specified arrangements if they choose to do so". The possibility to opt out is said to "preserve freedom of choice". Thaler and Sunstein published Nudge, a book-length defense of this political doctrine, in 2008.
Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule is an American legal scholar who is currently the Ralph S. Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. He is an expert on constitutional and administrative law, and, since 2016, has voiced support for Catholic integralism. He has articulated this into his theory of common-good constitutionalism.
Christine M. Jolls is the Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor of Law and Organization at Yale Law School, where she has been since 2006. She is known for her work in the emerging theory of behavioral economics and law. Her areas of research include employment law and contracts.
Richard H. Pildes is an American legal scholar who is the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at the New York University School of Law and a expert on constitutional law, the Supreme Court, the system of government in the United States, and legal issues concerning the structure of democracy, including election law. His scholarship focuses on public law and legal issues affecting democracy.
Marriage privatization is the concept that the state should have no authority to define the terms of personal relationships such as marriage. Proponents of marriage privatization, including certain minarchists, anarchists, libertarians, and opponents of government interventionism, claim that such relationships are best defined by private individuals and not the state. Arguments for the privatization of marriage have been offered by a number of scholars and writers. Proponents of marriage privatization often argue that privatizing marriage is a solution to the social controversy over same-sex marriage. Arguments for and against the privatization of marriage span both liberal and conservative political camps.
Richard Allen Posner is an American legal scholar and retired federal judge who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1981 to 2017. A senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Posner was identified by The Journal of Legal Studies as the most-cited legal scholar of the 20th century. As of 2021, he is also the most-cited legal scholar of all time. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential legal scholars in the United States.
Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness is a book written by University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler, and Harvard Law School professor Cass R. Sunstein, first published in 2008. In 2021, a revised edition was released, subtitled The Final Edition.
Nudge theory is a concept in behavioral economics, decision making, behavioral policy, social psychology, consumer behavior, and related behavioral sciences that proposes adaptive designs of the decision environment as ways to influence the behavior and decision-making of groups or individuals. Nudging contrasts with other ways to achieve compliance, such as education, legislation or enforcement.
The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), also known unofficially as the "Nudge Unit", is a UK-based global social purpose organisation that generates and applies behavioural insights to inform policy and improve public services, following nudge theory. Using social engineering, as well as techniques in psychology, behavioral economics, and marketing, the purpose of the organisation is to influence public thinking and decision making in order to improve compliance with government policy and thereby decrease social and government costs related to inaction and poor compliance with policy and regulation. The Behavioural Insights Team has been headed by British psychologist David Halpern since its formation.
Lucia A. Reisch is a German behavioural economist and social scientist by training and the El-Erian Professor of Behavioural Economics and Policy at the University of Cambridge since September 2021. Since April 2022 the Professorship is located at the Cambridge Judge Business School. She is a Professorial Fellow and the Deputy Dean of Queens’ College, Cambridge.
A urinal target, sometimes known by the specific types urinal fly or urinal bee, is an image or mark placed inside a urinal to encourage users to aim in a particular place so as to avoid messes and reduce cleaning costs.
Common good constitutionalism is a legal theory formulated by Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule that asserts that "the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to 'protect liberty' as an end in itself". Vermeule describes it as an attempt to revive and develop the classical legal tradition by understanding enacted law as a positive application of background natural law principles. Within this tradition, he claims law is defined as "an ordinance of reason promulgated by political authorities for the common good." Vermeule states that law in this sense is "not tethered to particular written instruments of civil law or the will of the legislators who created them" but instead embody rational determinations of the common good, and it is those determinations, as well as the natural law background against which they are made, which constitute the law. Vermeule says that these principles include "a candid willingness to "legislate morality."
Sludge in behavioral economics refers to any form of design, administrative, or policy-related friction that systematically impedes individuals' actions or decisions. It encompasses a range of frictions such as complex forms, hidden fees, and manipulative defaults that increase the effort, time, or cost required to make a choice, often benefiting the designer at the expense of the user's interest.
1 2 Thaler, Richard H.; Sunstein, Cass R. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Caravan Books. ISBN978-0-300-12223-7.
↑ "Archived copy"(PDF). Archived from the original(PDF) on February 20, 2012. Retrieved June 6, 2012.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link), Accessed July 22, 2009
↑ David Ray Griffin, Cognitive Infiltration, An Obama Appointee's Plan To Undermine The 9/11 Conspiracy Theory. Olive Branch Press, ISBN978-1-56656-821-0
↑ Kurtis Hagen, "Is Infiltration of 'Extremist Groups' Justified?" International Journal of Applied Philosophy 24.2 (Fall 2010) 153–68.
↑ Kurtis Hagen, "Conspiracy Theories and Stylized Facts," Journal for Peace and Justice Studies 21.2 (Fall 2011) 3–22.
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