Liars

Liars: Falsehood And Free Speech In An Age Of Deception.
​Cass R. Sunstein.
Oxford University Press. 2021. ISBN: 9780197545119.

Liars by legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein analyses how law and institutions should respond to lying and misinformation without unduly restricting free expression. Sunstein asks when, if ever, governments should be allowed to regulate falsehoods, and how to do so without giving the state broad power to label contested speech as lies. Key themes include: the harms of falsehoods to public health, safety, and democratic self‑government (e.g., conspiracy theories, disinformation campaigns); the traditional U.S. free‑speech baseline that even false statements are generally protected unless they pose serious, hard‑to‑avoid harms; and the risk that broad anti‑lie laws become tools for censorship and suppression of dissent.
 
Reviewers describe the book as a concise, accessible intervention in debates over fake news, deepfakes, and online misinformation that defends a strongly speech‑protective legal baseline while endorsing targeted regulation of especially dangerous lies. 
 
Cass Robert Sunstein (born September 21, 1954) is an American legal scholar best known for his work on constitutional law, administrative law, and behavioural economics, and for his influence on contemporary regulatory policy. He was born in Waban, Massachusetts, and graduated from Middlesex School in 1972,  earning his Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, from Harvard College in 1975 and his Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1978. 
 
After law school, Sunstein clerked for Justice Benjamin Kaplan of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and then for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court. He worked as an attorney‑advisor in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel before joining the University of Chicago Law School faculty in 1981. In 2008 he was on the  Harvard Law School faculty, and later became Robert Walmsley University Professor, the university’s highest faculty rank. From 2009 to 2012 he served as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration, a key post overseeing federal regulation.
 
Sunstein is one of the most widely cited legal scholars in the United States, with work spanning constitutional theory, democratic deliberation, risk regulation, environmental law, and the integration of behavioural economics into public policy. In 2018 he received the Holberg Prize from the Norwegian government, often described as a Nobel‑level award for law and the humanities, recognizing the breadth and impact of his contributions.