About the Authors
Associate Justice, Ret., Supreme Court of the United States
Byrne Professor of Administrative Law & Process, Harvard Law School
Hon. Stephen G. Breyer
Stephen Breyer is a former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, having served from 1994 to 2022. After graduation from Harvard Law School, where he was Article Editor of the Harvard Law Review, Justice Breyer served as law clerk to Justice Arthur Goldberg of the Supreme Court of the United States during the 1964 Term, a Special Assistant to the Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Antitrust, 1965–1967, an Assistant Special Prosecutor of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, 1973, Special Counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, 1974–1975, and Chief Counsel of the committee, 1979–1980. He was an Assistant Professor, Professor of Law, and Lecturer at Harvard Law School, 1967–1994, a Professor at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, 1977–1980, and a Visiting Professor at the College of Law, Sydney, Australia and at the University of Rome. From 1980–1990, he served as a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit; he was its Chief Judge from 1990–1994. He was also a member of the Judicial Conference of the United States, 1990–1994, and of the United States Sentencing Commission, 1985–1989.
Late University Professor and John Edward Sexton Professor of Law, New York University
Richard B. Stewart
One of the leading environmental and administrative law scholars of his generation, Richard Stewart had a lengthy and varied career in and out of the academy. At the time of his death in 2023, he was University Professor and John Edward Sexton Professor of Law at New York University. Prior to joining the NYU faculty, Stewart served as Byrne Professor of Administrative Law at Harvard Law School and as a member of the faculty of the Kennedy School of Government. Over the years he was also a visiting professor at the Universities of Bologna, Chicago, and Rome, the University of California at Berkeley, the European University Institute, and Georgetown University. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute, and the editorial boards of several European scholarly journals.
Outside of the academy, Stewart served as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. He also had a longstanding affiliation with the Environmental Defense Fund, having served as Chair, Advisory Trustee, and a member of the Legal Action Committee. Early in his career he clerked for Justice Potter Stewart, was an Associate at Covington & Burling, and was Special Counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities.
A prolific author, Stewart published ten books and more than 80 articles on topics in environmental and administrative law, including the intersection of theory and practice in environmental law and the need to develop innovative methods for environmental protection generally and climate change prevention in particular. His writing favored a reliance on a market-oriented approach to environmental protection. He also pioneered the field of Global Administrative Law.
Professor Stewart was a graduate of Yale College, Oxford University (where he was a Rhodes Scholar), and Harvard Law School. He was also awarded honorary Doctorates by Erasmus University Rotterdam and the University of Rome.
Robert Walmsley University Professor
Harvard University
Cass R. Sunstein
Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard University, where he is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2008, he was Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School.
In 2021, Professor Sunstein became Senior Counsel at the Department of Homeland Security. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has also served on the President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, on the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board, as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom, and as Chair of the World Health Organization’s technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health.
Professor Sunstein graduated in 1975 from Harvard College and in 1978 from Harvard Law School magna cum laude. After 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 University of Chicago, he was an attorney-advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice.
The most prolific legal scholar of his (or perhaps any) generation, Professor Sunstein has written scores of books on a wide variety of topics. Some of the more recent include Campus Free Speech: A Pocket Guide (2024); How to Become Famous: Lost Einsteins, Forgotten Superstars, and How the Beatles Came to Be (2024), Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There (2024) (with Tali Sharot), Advanced Introduction to Behavioral Law and Economics (2023), How to Interpret the Constitution (2023); Decisions About Decisions (2023), Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do About It (2021), Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (2021) (with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony), Nudge: The Final Edition (2021) (with Richard Thaler), Behavioral Science and Public Policy (2020), Law and Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State (2020) (with Adrian Vermeule), Too Much Information: Understanding What You Don’t Want to Know (2020), The World According to Star Wars (rev. ed. 2019), Conformity: The Power of Social Influences (2019), On Freedom (2019), and How Change Happens (2019).
In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities.
Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law
Harvard Law School
Adrian Vermeule
Adrian Vermeule is the Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches Administrative Law, Legislation, Constitutional Law, and National Security Law. Vermeule was on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School from 1998 to 2005. There, he was twice awarded the Graduating Students’ Award for Teaching Excellence. Before entering the academy, he served as a clerk to Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia and to Judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Professor Vermeule's writings focus on institutional theory. He is the author or co-author of ten books, including Common Good Constitutionalism (Polity 2022), Law and Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State (Harvard 2020) (with Cass Sunstein), Law’s Abnegation: From Law’s Empire to the Administrative State (Harvard 2016), The Constitution of Risk (Cambridge 2014), and The System of the Constitution (Oxford 2012). Professor Vermeule is a member of the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States.
Arthur Kaplan Professor of Law
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University
Michael Herz
Michael Herz is Arthur Kaplan Professor of Law at the Cardozo School of Law. He was Cardozo's Vice Dean from 2006 to 2009 and 1996 to 2000. Professor Herz came to Cardozo from the Environmental Defense Fund, where he was a staff attorney for three years. Previously, he clerked for Associate Justice Byron R. White of the US Supreme Court and for Chief Judge Levin H. Campbell of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. He was a visiting professor at New York University School of Law in 2000-01 and 2005-06 and has also taught at Columbia Law School and at Princeton University, where he spent the 2011-2012 academic year as a Fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs. Professor Herz is a past Chair of the ABA's Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice and is a Senior Fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States.