Cass Sunstein: Pragmatic Progressive

Sunstein is a staunch defender of government intervention in economic and social affairs. In The Partial Constitution, After the Rights Revolution (1993), and The Second Bill of Rights (2006), he works diligently to defend the regulatory state against the objection that it artificially appoints winners and losers in place of the free market’s “natural,” “neutral,” “prepolitical” outcomes. The market’s outcomes are not neutral or prepolitical, he insists, but are themselves reflections of the distribution of power in society. There is no such thing as “status quo neutrality.”