Distinguished Service Professorship to Sunstein

Sunstein, an expert in constitutional and administrative law, has been a member of the Law School faculty since 1981. He is Co-Director of the Law School's Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe. He also holds a joint appointment in Political Science.

"Cass Sunstein is an outstanding scholar, teacher and colleague," said President Sonnenschein. "We are most fortunate to have him as a member of our faculty, and I am delighted that we are able to honor him in this way."

A prolific author, Sunstein has been named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the nation and called "one of the leading constitutional theorists and one of the nation's best legal scholars" by the National Law Journal. His most recent book, Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech (1993), which won the 1994 Goldsmith Book Award from Harvard, gained national attention for its analysis of the limits of free speech and the future of First Amendment law. Sunstein's other books include The Partial Constitution (1993) and After the Rights Revolution: Reconceiving the Regulatory State (1990) and two forthcoming books, Political Conflict and Legal Reasoning and Free Markets and Social Justice. He is the co-editor, with Provost Geoffrey Stone, the Harry Kalven Jr. Distinguished Service Professor in the Law School, and Richard Epstein, the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor in the Law School, of The Bill of Rights in the Modern State (1992). Sunstein and Stone also co-wrote Constitutional Law (1991), the nation's leading constitutional-law casebook.

Sunstein has participated in and written extensively on law reform and constitution-making efforts in Eastern Europe and the Russian Republic, as well as on democracy issues in Bosnia, South Africa, Israel and China. He has testified before several national and local government bodies, including the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate Government Affairs Committee, the House Rules Committee and the Illinois House of Representatives.

Sunstein received his B.A. in 1975 and his J.D. in 1978 from Harvard. Following graduation, he clerked for Justice Benjamin Kaplan of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court. Before joining the faculty of the Law School, he was an attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice.