Cass Robert Sunstein (born September 21, 1954) is an American legal scholar known for his studies of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and behavioral economics. He is also The New York Times best-selling author of The World According to Star Wars (2016) and Nudge (2008). He was the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2012. As a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for 27 years, he wrote influential works on regulatory and constitutional law, among other topics. Since leaving the White House, Sunstein has been the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. In 2014, studies of legal publications found Sunstein to be the most frequently cited American legal scholar by a wide margin. Early life and education Sunstein was born on September 21, 1954, in Waban, Massachusetts, to Marian (née Goodrich), a teacher, and Cass Richard Sunstein, a builder, both Jewish. He graduated in 1972 from Middlesex School. He has said that as a teenager, he was briefly infatuated with the works of Ayn Rand, "[b]ut after about six weeks of enchantment, her books started to make me sick. Contemptuous toward most of humanity, merciless about human frailty, and constantly hammering on the moral evils of redistribution, they produced a sense of claustrophobia." After high school, Sunstein attended Harvard College. He was a member of the varsity squash team and an editor of the Harvard Lampoon, and graduated in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude. He then attended the Harvard Law School, where he became the executive editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and was a member of the winning team of the Ames Moot Court Competition. He graduated in 1978 with a Juris Doctor, magna cum laude. Career After law school, Sunstein first clerked for Justice Benjamin Kaplan of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from 1978 to 1979, then for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1979 to 1980. After his clerkships, Sunstein spent one year as an attorney-advisor in the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. In 1981, he became an assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School (1981–1983), where he also became an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science (1983–1985). In 1985, Sunstein was made a full professor of both political science