Skip to the main content

Cass Sunstein

Robert Walmley Professor of Law

Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities.

In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He serves as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Sunstein is author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, including Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), Simpler: The Future of Government (2013), The Ethics of Influence (2015), #Republic (2017), Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide (2017), The Cost-Benefit Revolution (2018), On Freedom (2019), Conformity (2019), How Change Happens (2019), and Too Much Information (2020). He is now working on a variety of projects involving the regulatory state, “sludge” (defined to include paperwork and similar burdens), fake news, and freedom of speech.


Projects & Tools

Artificial Intelligence and the Law

This initiative focuses on new challenges and opportunities for the law created by the rise of AI.


News

SSRN
Aug 19, 2023

Do People Like Algorithms? A Research Strategy

Co-director of Artificial Intelligence and Law Project Cass R. Sunstein and Lucia Reisch provide preliminary findings on whether people like algorithms and offer a strategy for…


Community

Journal of Legal Analysis

Algorithmic Harm in Consumer Markets

BKC Faculty Associate Oren Bar-Gill and co-director of Artificial Intelligence and Law Project Cass R. Sunstein, co-write with Inbal Talgam-Cohen on addressing the potential harms…

Aug 21, 2023
The Crimson

Harvard Law School and Berkman Klein Center Announce New AI and the Law Initiative

Harvard Law School and BKC announce a new initiative on AI and the law which will be directed by Harvard Law Professors Oren Bar-Gill and Cass R. Sunstein.

Jul 26, 2023

Events

Oct 17, 2023 @ 12:00 PM

Artificial Intelligence and the Law

Lightning Talks with Experts

Join us for a series of lightning talks to kick off of the Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and the Law...

Event
Mar 10, 2017 @ 4:00 PM

#Republic: Divided

Democracy in the Age of Social Media

In this revealing book, Cass Sunstein, the New York Times bestselling author of Nudge and The World According to Star Wars, shows how today's Internet is driving political…

Nov 17, 2016 @ 1:00 PM

Transparency and Freedom of Information in the Digital Age

This symposium seeks to examine the present state of play with respect to transparency and freedom of information.