PERSON

Cass Sunstein

American legal scholar (b. 1954), Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard, co-author with Richard Thaler of Nudge and with Kahneman and Sibony of Noise — the scholar who most influentially translated behavioral findings into regulatory policy.

Cass Sunstein is one of the most cited legal scholars in the world and the figure most responsible for integrating behavioral economics into public policy and regulatory design. His collaboration with Richard Thaler produced Nudge (2008), which formalized choice architecture as a policy instrument. His collaboration with Kahneman and Sibony produced Noise (2021), which extended the behavioral framework into the domain of professional judgment variability. Sunstein served as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration (2009–2012), where he implemented behavioral-economics principles across federal regulatory review.

In The You On AI Field Guide

Sunstein's role in Noise was to bring legal and institutional analysis to what had been primarily a psychological framework. His long work on judicial decision-making, administrative law, and regulatory impact analysis provided the empirical examples — judges, doctors, underwriters, evaluators — that grounded the book's argument.

His post-Noise work on AI has focused on the governance implications. He has argued

In The You On AI Field Guide

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