Obama's Regulation Czar Nominee Sunstein Faces Scrutiny

Harvard Law School professor Cass R. Sunstein, a widely admired intellectual and friend of President Obama, has spent years delving into the obscure issues of regulatory law and behavioral economics.

Though he is generally described as left of center, Sunstein's academic interests in regulation have led him to raise questions about the constitutionality of liberal favorites such as workplace safety laws and the Clean Air Act. He has embraced a controversial "senior death discount" that calculates the lives of younger people as having a greater value than those of the elderly.

Read the whole story here.

Comments

[Hopalongpoppyseed]

There are no Czars in America!

[StephenJK]

""senior death discount" that calculates the lives of younger people as having a greater value than those of the elderly."

boy, it takes a real genius to figure this out. I think they figured this out 80 or so years ago when life expectancy shot through the roof.

[hortonhearsawho2]

Did Blago and this guy Cut a deal at sometime..­.

[Yalegirl03]

I hope Sunstein passes muster. Having taken his Environmental law classes and his administrative law classes, I feel that there would be some difference between his scholarship and the policies he would implement. I think that going by someones scholarly writings as the sole measure of their policy stances could be misleading. (It may be appropriate when confirming judges, but not as helpful in this case.) One thing about scholarship is that you can think about problems and judge the efficiency of regulations and systems in a vacuum. It can be a pure thought experiment that could in some ways be instructive of how things should or could operate in the real world, but not necessarily so. One thing that always amazed me about Sunstein as a professor and led me to take all of his classes that I could was the rapidity of this thinking and the breadth and depth of his scholarship. I don't think Sunstein js an enemy of the environment or that he would strip the CAA of its claws. I think he knows the value of having strong regulations but he also knows the value of having those regulations be effective and positively impact what they purport to impact. That isn't always the case with regulations. Sometimes the left can be too scared of taking steps backward to really scrutinize and improve regulations so that they are workable and effective.

[carolinecantoo]

Thank You for posting. It is helpful for me to hear firsthand accounts. Most appreciated.

[Puddin]

Yes...read­ing your post helped me to understand the "real deal" and could not agree with you more. What you stated made so such sense (and you have first hand knowledge). Thank you.