The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

Conference: "Speech, Privacy, and the Internet: The University and Beyond"

Late last year, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics Martha Nussbaum and Harry Kalven Visiting Professor of Law Cass Sunstein organized a conference devoted to an interdisciplinary discussion of the legal and ethical issues posed by the new ways in which privacy can be invaded. "Speech, Privacy, and the Internet: The University and Beyond" brought together leading scholars to discuss these topics. As the conference webpage states,

The current rise in invasive personal gossip, much of it anonymous and much of it directed at students, often by other students, creates an atmosphere that threatens to disrupt the climate of instruction.  On the other hand, restrictions on such internet sites raise delicate free speech issues. What challenges do these developments raise on campus, and what direction should universities take to meet these challenges?

Video of the conference keynote address, by former Chicago professor Lawrence Lessig, is embedded after the jump. The video also includes intros from Profs. Nussbaum and Sunstein and Provost Thomas Rosenbaum. You can read the University News Office story about the conference here. Audio downloads, abstracts, and selected papers are available here.

Audio: Richard Epstein and Cass Sunstein: "Should Conservatives Vote for Obama?"

Back in March, Chicago's chapters of the Federalist Society and the Black Law Students Association cohosted a very well-attended debate on the question of whether conservative voters should support Barack Obama's presidential bid. Cass Sunstein (then Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence, now Visiting Professor of Law, as well as informal adviser to the Obama campaign) discussed why he thought some conservatives would embrace Obama, while James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law Richard Epstein pointed out a number of Obama's economic positions that he thought would be troubling to conservative voters. You can listen to the discussion by downloading the .mp3 file.

Video: Sunstein and Thaler on "Nudge" and Noodles

Via the Research at Chicago site:

[Richard] Thaler and [Cass] Sunstein reminisce at their favorite Hyde Park lunch spot, Noodles, where they say they did some of their best work on the book. Noodles was so important to the creative process, it even made the acknowledgments. The two talk about what each brought to the project, the origin of the elephants on the book cover, their fear of forms, and their hopes for a new political consensus in the country.

Related Links:

• Nudge Blog
• Nudge Website

Video: Cass Sunstein and Eugene Volokh on Information Cocoons

Yesterday, Bloggingheads.tv posted a discussion between Cass Sunstein and Eugene Volokh of UCLA (and the Volokh Conspiracy), in which they touch on questions of fairness, balkanization, serendipity, and defamation in the discourse of the blogosphere.

Sunstein Interviewed by "The Glenn and Helen Show"

On Monday, Cass Sunstein appeared on the podcast "The Glenn and Helen Show," discussing libertarian paternalism with host Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com. You can listen to the podcast here.

Cass Sunstein's Op-Eds on Libertarian Paternalism

Along with the Graduate School of Business' Richard Thaler, his co-author for the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Cass Sunstein recently published two op-eds touching on the topic of that book. The first, in the April 2nd Los Angeles Times, gives a broad overview of the idea of libertarian paternalism that Sunstein and Thaler advance in their book; the other, in the April 6 Chicago Tribune, focuses on how libertarian paternalism might be applied to the problem of climate change. Since Cass' ideas about this topic have come up frequently on this blog (see here, here, here, and most recently here), we thought it might be interesting to let the readers of the Faculty Blog chime in on these pieces.

Edited to Add: Cass and his co-author, Richard Thaler, have a blog on Nudge-related topics that those interested in this topic might enjoy.

Podcast: Eric Posner and Cass Sunstein on "Climate Change Justice"

Greenhouse gas reductions would cost some nations much more than others, and benefit some nations far less than others. Significant reductions would impose especially large costs on the United States, and recent projections suggest that the U.S. has relatively less to lose from climate change. In these circumstances, what does justice require the U.S. to do?

This is the question that the University of Chicago Environmental Law Society and International Law Society invited professors Cass Sunstein and Eric Posner to discuss during a lunchtime talk yesterday. You can listen to their talk here.

One-Click Paternalism

For a number of years, those interested in behavioral economics have been exploring how recent findings about human fallibility might bear on law and public policy. There has been growing interest in various forms of paternalism -- alternately described as light, soft, asymmetrical, and libertarian. For all these approaches, the unifying idea is that private and public institutions might adopt rules that steer people in directions that will make their lives go better while also maintaining freedom of choice. An example is a default rule (say, for savings or for health care) that, if unaltered, helps all or most people; another example is a cooling-off period (say, for encyclopedia sales).

Richard Thaler and I have been working on the topic of paternalism for many years, and have been defending forms of paternalism that preserve freedom of choice. Some libertarians, fearful of government bias or error, have objected that if public officials are involved, paternalism has no legitimate place.

In response to this objection, we have recently become interested in the possibility of "one-click paternalism," embodied in approaches that nudge people in good directions, but that allow essentially costless opt-outs. An example would be an automatic enrollment plan for savings, which workers could reject by a press of a button. Another example would be a default prescription drug plan for seniors, which people could replace with a plan that better suits their needs with a click (or possibly two).

If one-click paternalism provides a useful model, cooling-off periods are a bit more controversial, at least if you can't one-click your way out of them. Thaler and I think that one-click paternalism is often a useful approach for private institutions (employers, rental car companies, cell phone providers) and that the market will produce at least some protection against self-interested or venal nudging.

For government, we think that a form of public nudging is inevitable (short of anarchy), and that in many domains, one-click paternalism is preferable to both the command-and-control regulation favored by many liberals and the laissez-faire approaches favored by many conservatives. (For those interested in a detailed treatment, see our new book on these issues here.)

Conspiracy Theories

All over the world, people accept conspiracy theories. ("The truth is out there.") Many people believe that high-level officials in the United States government were responsible for the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Many people believe that AIDS was deliberately engineered by doctors. Millions of people believe that the attacks of 9/11 were undertaken by the United States or by Israel. Millions of people in the developing world believe that the United States is now plotting to conduct some nefarious campaign against them.

Conspiracy theories create an array of puzzles. What, exactly, are they? What counts as a conspiracy theory? Why do people accept conspiracy theories? Should government do anything about them? Adrian Vermeule and I try to make progress on these questions in a paper that is available here. For the moment, let us notice that a distinctive feature of conspiracy theories is their self-sealing quality: Those who hold such a theory are likely to be both motivated and able to fold contrary evidence into the theory itself, and even to conclude that the contrary evidence is further proof of the conspiracy. Often conspiracy theorists spend much of their time in isolated networks of like-minded others, which makes it all the more difficult to undermine their beliefs.

Some conspiracy theories are innocuous, fun, and funny. (On the innocuous and fun side, consider the parental conspiracies that give rise to widespread beliefs in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.) But some such theories are extremely dangerous, because they produce intense feelings of hatred and humiliation, and a real potential for violence. A serious task is to decide when it is worthwhile for government to try to debunk a conspiracy theory -- and to try to find ways to overcome the self-sealing quality of the theory through some form of infiltration.

Video: Cass Sunstein on the 2nd Amendment

Back in November, we posted a podcast of the Cass Sunstein CBI, "The Second Amendment: The Constitution's Most Mysterious Right." In our continuing effort to add more video to the blog, please find below a recording of the the talk (you can also download a Quicktime version here).