Mr. Sunstein, a prolific academic with wide-ranging interests, may be best known for advancing a field known as "law and behavioral economics" that seeks to shape law and policy around the way research shows people actually behave. The theory builds on earlier approaches developed at the University of Chicago law school that sought to harmonize regulatory law with free-market economics. Although widely embraced by conservatives, critics said it failed to account for the sometimes less-than-rational aspects of human behavior.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last year, Mr. Sunstein said Mr. Obama was intrigued by "law and behavioral economics" as an approach to regulation that would avoid ideological extremes.

Mr. Obama believes in "doing law in a way that's realistically based on human behavior," Mr. Sunstein said.

We might ban hunting altogether, at least if its sole purpose is
human recreation. (Should animals be hunted and killed simply because people enjoy
hunting and killing them? The issue might be different if hunting and killing could be
justified as having important functions, such as control of populations or protection of
human beings against animal violence.)

Of course the largest issue involves eating meat. I
believe that that meat-eating would be acceptable if decent treatment is given to the
animals used for food. Killing animals, whether or not troublesome, is far less
troublesome than suffering. But if, as a practical matter, animals used for food are almost
inevitably going to endure terrible suffering, then there is a good argument that people
should not eat meat to the extent that a refusal to eat meat will reduce that suffering. Of
course a legal ban on meat-eating would be extremely radical, and like prohibition, it
would undoubtedly create black markets and have a set of bad, and huge, side-effects.
But the principle seems clear: People should be much less inclined to eat meat if their
refusal to do so would prevent significant suffering.

Originally posted by Iamonlyhuman
That link didn't work for me. Could you link it again or perhaps type it out?