Immigration Law

SUNSTEIN TAKES HARVARD POSITION

By Greg Siskind

This is not really immigration news, but my favorite professor from law school and the one who had a lot of influence in my choosing to go in to immigration law has just been traded to Harvard Law School after decades at the University of Chicago. Professor Cass Sunstein taught me administrative law and environmental law. He talked me in to trying out environmental law at the beginning of my career, but it was my administrative law course with him that eventually led me to make immigration law a career and for that I'm very thankful.

Professor Sunstein is one of a handful of law professors known by the national media and his opinion pieces are regularly published by the nation's leading newspapers. He started out graduating from Harvard Law School and going on to clerk for the great US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and then went on to become of of the University of Chicago faculty's legendary professors. In recent years, he's led efforts to developed modern constitutions for new democracies in Eastern Europe.

The news of Professor Sunstein's move is considered so important in the law school world that the American Bar Association Journal wrote a feature story on it. Harvard's Law School Dean Ellen Kagen sums up how important this is in their press release announcing the move:

"Cass Sunstein is the preeminent legal scholar of our time -- the most wide-ranging, the most prolific, the most cited, and the most influential," said Kagan. "His work in any one of the fields he pursues -- administrative law and policy, constitutional law and theory, behavioral economics and law, environmental law, to name a non-exhaustive few -- would put him in the very front ranks of legal scholars; the combination is singular and breathtaking. He has a gift for framing and discussing issues in ways that invariably gain traction and make progress. And perhaps best of all, this individual superstar is also the consummate team player -- a person whose passion for reasoned intellectual inquiry is contagious and who raises the level of everyone around him. If I could add only one person to the faculty, Cass would be that person, and I am thrilled beyond measure to announce his appointment."

Good luck, Professor Sunstein!

Full post as published by Greg Siskind's Blog on March 01, 2008 (boomark / email).