You Tube Theology

On March 20, 2026, Cass Sunstein discussed his new book, On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom. Moderated by Professor Robert P. George, Professor Sunstein was in conversation with Professor Sherif Girgis of Notre Dame Law School.

Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. 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. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. Professor Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He has served as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.

Professor Sunstein is author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, including Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), Simpler: The Future of Government (2013), The Ethics of Influence (2015), #Republic (2017), Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide (2017), The Cost-Benefit Revolution (2018), On Freedom (2019), Conformity (2019), How Change Happens (2019), and Too Much Information (2020). He is now working on a variety of projects involving the regulatory state, “sludge” (defined to include paperwork and similar burdens), fake news, and freedom of speech.

Sherif Girgis is a professor at Notre Dame Law School. His work in constitutional law and theory has appeared in the Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review, Virginia Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and online supplements to the Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal. He is editing the next edition of a First Amendment casebook formerly edited by Fred Schauer, and coediting with Mike Dorf a constitutional law casebook formerly coedited by Dick Fallon. His scholarship has been cited by Justices and judges and featured in the New York Times. He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and D.C. Circuit Judge Thomas Griffith. Now completing his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton, Girgis earned his J.D. at Yale, a master’s (B.Phil.) in philosophy from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and a bachelor’s from Princeton, summa cum laude.