Author Archive | Cass Sunstein

If you’re interested in the subject and are in the D.C. area, you might want to check out this panel next Tuesday, April 29, at 12 noon at the Mayflower ($20, lunch included). Click here to register. The panelists will be Prof. Lillian BeVier (Virginia), Prof. Lee Levine (Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz and Georgetown), […]

A long and interesting post at Balkinization.

This is what Cass Sunstein was guest-blogging about here last week, but in a podcast, available here from Glenn Reynolds (InstaPundit) and his wife Helen Smith. Very interesting stuff.

Her quite gracious comments: If you want to know if anyone is reading your stories, make sure you insert a mistake about George Washington. Oh, if only I could claim it was all a ploy by Calendar editors to gauge readership. But when I wrote in Saturday’s story about HBO that George Washington stepped down […]

I’ve often heard this line in various forms, most recently in a WallStreet Journal article that’s generally sympathetic to gun owners: “Growing up in Seattle, I knew nobody who owned a gun.” The striking thing is that this statement is almost certainly false: I strongly suspect that anyone growing up even in a very insular […]

The Times (London) reports (thanks to Overlawyered for the pointer): The Royal Navy … has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights. Warships patrolling pirate-infested waters, such as those off Somalia, have been warned that there is also a risk that captured pirates could […]

A French bill (No. 791, April 9, 2008), would provide (translation by my brother Sasha): “Art. 223-14-1. The fact of provoking a person to seek an excessive thinness by encouraging prolonged dietary restrictions having for effect to expose him to a danger of death or to directly compromise his health is punished by two years […]

  Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.

The House of Lords decision I discuss below rejected a free speech claim brought by an animal rights group, but in the process reasoned this way (paragraph break added): In the present case also the proposed advertisement is wholly inoffensive, and one may be sympathetic to the appellant’s aims or some of them. But the […]

1. One problem with the “equalization” argument for campaign finance restrictions — especially those applied to independent spending by individuals or organizations — is that their logic reaches considerably beyond campaigns. If fairness concerns justify barring expensive speech aimed at backing or defeating a candidate or ballot measure, why not speech aimed at supporting or […]

Human beings are greatly influenced by the actual or apparent behavior of others. Consider just a few examples: 1. Federal judges on three-judge panels are much affected by the votes of their colleagues. Democratic appointees, sitting with two Republican appointees, show pretty conservative voting patterns. Republican appointees, sitting with two Democratic appointees, show pretty liberal […]

Libertarian paternalists, or nudgers, want to preserve freedom of choice while also using default rules, disclosure strategies, and other aspects of the choice environment to incline people in good directions. Because human beings are subject to systematic errors, libertarian paternalists want to provide a little help. It is natural to wonder: Why should we trust […]

First of all, many thanks to Eugene for his kindness and generosity in supporting this discussion. While Richard Thaler and I have been working on the topic of libertarian paternalism for a long time, we continue to think of our project as a work-in-progress, and we are eager for suggestions and criticisms. The basic idea […]

With or without written constitutions, all nations have constitutive commitments, some codified in some form, others just widely understood as such. Randy Barnett asks, rightly, the sense in which these are “commitments” and “constitutive.” They’re commitments in the sense that they’re taken (politically, that is) to be binding, and not to be subject to change […]

Thanks to Randy Barnett, and assorted emailers, for excellent questions and comments about constitutive commitments and FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. Constitutive commitments first: They’re not part of the formal constitution and they’re certainly not for judicial enforcement. They nonetheless matter, because they have sufficiently wide and deep political support that they’re effectively binding — […]