Author Archive | Todd Zywicki

On the US Constitution.

Stephen Breyer lists his “Intellectual Influences” at Five Books (which is a cool website, if you’ve never seen it).

Hmmm, I’m starting to think this whole Durbin Amendment thing might not be such a great idea.  For still further reasons why I think that, you can check out my article in The American, “Durbin’s Innovation Killer.”

My column in today’s Washington Times takes issue with the proposal to force lenders to write-down principal as a response to the robo-signing fiasco.

Interesting perspective by Jim DeLong in The American today on the underlying logic of the Durbin Amendment and its focus on incremental cost as the exclusion of costs for maintenance of the underlying network building and maintenance costs.

I’m delighted to have been invited to participate in a conference scheduled this fall sponsored by the Washington and Lee Law Review on “Regulation in the Fringe Economy.”  They’ve also issued a Call for Papers for anyone else interested.  Here’s the announcement: Call for Papers Regulation in the Fringe Economy The symposium Regulation in the […]

Greg Lukianoff has more on the federal government’s new Office for Civil Rights regulations on sexual harassment.  One of FIRE’s longstanding points is that oftentimes these days speech codes travel under the cover of sexual harassment policies, to which Greg adds that the OCR regs essentially require universities to adopt unconstitutional speech codes.  He cites […]

I appeared on the Bob Frimet radio show out of Las Vegas yesterday discussing payday lending.  Audio of the broadcast is available here.  Special thanks to Bob for being an informed and knowledgeable host.  I pop up about midway through.

and the DKE controversy at Minding the Campus.

One of the commenters on Jonathan’s post on the filibuster of Goodwin Liu links to an LA Times story where politicians suggest that Republicans are going to pay a political price for filibustering him.  Maybe they’re right.  But it does bring to mind the story about the efforts of the Republicans to politicize the Democratic […]

It is generally recognized that the fraud rate on signature debit historically has been higher than the fraud rate on PIN debit.  Getting the exact numbers of fraud rates is a bit elusive, but the numbers reported here seem to comport with the general understanding. In part, the higher fraud rate on signature debit reflects […]

That’s my argument in this column on Forbes.com today.

An interesting article from the Silicon Valley Mercury News on people using the bankruptcy code to strip-off completely underwater second mortgages.  The author of the article seems to think this is a chapter 13 thing, but what I think it is using Dewsnup v. Timm to strip off completely underwater second mortgages.  Dewsnup left unresolved […]

In today’s Washington Times.

He had been “high on bath salts” for three days (you can get high on bath salts?).  “Deputies had dealt with the man before and believe him to be mentally unstable.”  Really? Turns out that the goat, not the women’s underwear, is the source of the criminal charge here.