Review Of Cass R. Sunstein's A Constitution Of Many Minds
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The novel A Constitution of Many Minds: Why the Founding Document Doesn’t Mean What It Meant Before is written by Cass R. Sunstein, who is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. Sunstein is also the former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and is currently the director of Harvard Law School’s program on behavioral economics and public policy. In his book, A Constitution of Many Minds, Sunstein discusses different ways of interpreting the constitution and teaches his readers that interpreting the constitution is anything but simple.
Sunstein explores three different approaches to interpreting the Constitution: traditionalism, populism, and cosmopolitanism. The…show more content… Populism is an approach in which one would follow the majority and, finally, cosmopolitanism is an approach in which one would follow the lead of other countries. Sunstein also believes that within these three approaches is a “many minds argument –an argument “that if many people think something their view is entitled to consideration and respect.” Sunstein uses the Jury Theorem to prove that a many minds argument is better than a “single-minded” argument–one made by just the nine judges on the Supreme Court. The Jury Theorem states, “that the probability of a correct answer, by a majority of a group, increases toward 100 percent as the group gets bigger.” The main idea behind this theorem is that groups will be more successful than individuals, and larger groups will be more successful than smaller ones. This is always true “as long as two conditions are met: (a) majority rule is used and (b) each person is more the likely than not to be correct.” “Even if all or most people are not likely to be right, it is possible that the average or median answer, from a large population, will be more reliable than the answer of federal