Author Archive | Todd Zywicki

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of sitting down with Larry Parks as a guest on his New York City television show to discuss the Rule of Law, particularly as it relates to the state of the rule of law post-financial crisis.  You can watch here if you are so inclined.

I”ll be on the Bob Zadek radio show this afternoon at noon Pacific/3:00 Eastern to discuss the 17th Amendment.  You can listen on the radio or on the web here (and I understand it will be archived there as well).

Over the past few weeks there has been an emerging brouhaha about the investments of Dartmouth’s endowment in the firms of members of the board of trustees.  This is an issue about which I expressed concern as a matter of sound institutional governance.  The issue rose to a higher level a few weeks ago when […]

My new op-ed in the WSJ based on my paper with James Sherk is available here.

John Kiernan of Cardhub.com asked me what I thought of the Durbin Amendment so I told him.

I have just released this morning a new paper co-authored with James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation, “Auto Bailout or UAW Bailout?”  Here’s the Abstract: Abstract: The U.S. government will lose about $23 billion on the 2008-2009 bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. President Obama emphatically defends his decision to subsidize the automakers, arguing it was […]

I sat down with Richard Reinsch for a conversation on the auto bailouts and the rule of law, which he has posted on the Law and Liberty website.

from her: Elizabeth Warren admitted on Wednesday night for the first time that she told Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania of her Native American heritage — in contrast to her previous claim that she was unaware Harvard had listed her as a minority professor until recently. The Democratic Massachusetts Senate candidate told the Boston […]

As noted in the Boston Globe last week, it appears that Harvard may have run afoul of federal regulations in apparently identifying Elizabeth Warren as a Native American.  Whatever the full story, it appears that Dean Robert Clark was not the unidentified Native American on the Harvard faculty according to an interview in this story: […]

In my opinion (seemingly shared by virtually anyone else who has read his work), Harold Berman is one of the truly great legal thinkers of the 20th century and Law and Revolution is one of the great masterpieces of legal scholarship.  Berman has been one of my two most significant intellectual influences, along with Hayek.  You […]

I was out of town most of last week and I wasn’t planning on blogging any more on the increasingly bizarre saga of Elizabeth Warren’s claim to Native American ancestry, which as of the current moment appears to be entirely unsubstantiated.  But I was surprised to see Brian Leiter’s post doubling-down in his defense of […]

For those who lack the interest or patience to read my forthcoming full-blown law review article in the Washington & Lee law review, I have a shorter adapted version in latest issue of the Federalist Society’s journal Engage on the economics and regulation of bank overdraft protection.  Thanks to Nick Tuszynski of the Mercatus Center […]

Aside from Brian Leiter, whose contention that being Native American provides no affirmative action edge in law school hiring fails the straight-face test, it is obvious to everyone else why Elizabeth Warren self-identified as Native American all those years–which was to get an edge in hiring.  Even less plausible, of course, is her own explanation–that […]

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Milton Freidman’s Capitalism and Freedom the Liberty Law website has organized a symposium of reflections on the book’s legacy.  The introduction to the symposium is here.  My essay, which takes off on the coincidence of the publication of Capitalism and Freedom and Hayek’s The Constitution […]

I’ve posted a new, short essay on SSRN, “The Senate and Hyper-Partisanship: Would the Constitution Look Different If the Framers Had Known that Senators Would Be Elected in Partisan Elections?”  The essay was written for a symposium sponsored by the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy on the topic of “Hyper-Partisanship and The Law.” […]