Cass Sunstein is one of America’s leading legal scholars, and the former head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under Barack Obama. He has the distinction of being the most-cited legal scholar working today in the United States.

Sunstein studied at Harvard Law School, before clerking at first the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and then the United States Supreme Court under Justice Thurgood Marshall. After a brief stint at the Justice Department, he took up a post at the University of Chicago Law School, where he ascended through the school’s ranks to earn a distinguished service accolade in 1993. He served as a visiting professor at both Columbia and Harvard Law Schools, later moving to Harvard full time. Between 2009 and 2012, Sunstein served under President Barack Obama as the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Sunstein’s specialisms include constitutional, administrative and environmental law, and he has published widely, writing or contributing to over forty books. His published works stray into subjects as diverse as economics, feminism, technology and animal rights, and he frequently collaborates with thinkers and academics from other disciplines such as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum and the economist Richard Thaler.

Sunstein is also a guest writer on several prominent legal blogs, and is regularly called as a witness at congressional committees. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He has an Honorary Doctorate from Copenhagen Business School and was awarded the Holberg Prize by the government of Norway for outstanding contributions to scholarship.