The plan, which calls for airlines to collect fingerprints from aliens at the time of their departure from the U.S., follows the earlier implementation of the US-VISIT program, which takes fingerprints and photographs from aliens entering the U.S. The proposed exit system would allow immigration officials to match prints against those taken on entry to find out who has not left the U.S. on time.

Sales points out that Congress has called for exit controls since the 1990s and that many other countries have made successful use of such controls for years. Congress has a hard deadline of August 3, 2008, to establish a biometric exit system, based on 2007 legislation.

Exit Stage Right, National Review Online, April 24, 2008. By Nathan A. Sales.

Excerpt:
"The main value of exit is related to immigration — the ability to verify that guests don’t overstay their welcome. Federal immigration officers can use exit data to track down violators who are still in the country and have them deported. Less direct enforcement is possible, too. State and local police can use exit data to check whether an alien pulled over for a traffic stop is out of status. And if border officials know a particular visitor previously overstayed, they can bar him from entering if he later tries to return to the U.S.

"While exit is largely about immigration, it also has national security-advantages. According to the 9/11 Commission, four of the September 11 hijackers — including Mohamed Atta, the plot’s operational ringleader — had overstayed in the past. Hijacker Ziad Jarrah was an overstay when a Maryland state trooper gave him a speeding ticket just two days before the attacks. With an exit system, border officials could have turned away some of the hijackers when they subsequently tried to reenter the U.S. And police could have taken Jarrah into custody after a garden variety traffic stop.

"Why is DHS asking airlines to gather departure information on its behalf? The short answer is: Because they already do so. Right now, airlines are responsible for collecting biographic data about departing aliens — names, passport numbers, and the like — and transmitting it to DHS. The administration proposal simply adds another type of information to the list — fingerprints, a more reliable data point for matching entry and exit records.

"The longer answer is: Because there’s no other way to run exit effectively. Taking fingerprints at the TSA security checkpoint would distract already overburdened screeners from their job of keeping weapons off planes. And allowing aliens to check out at out-of-the-way airport kiosks — which DHS tried in an early exit pilot — virtually guarantees low passenger compliance."

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The Pontifical Council of the Laity is made up of 36 Members and 20 Consultors and functions as an advisory body for the pope on matters concerning non-clerical persons. Members of the Council consist of eight cardinals, three bishops, and 25 lay persons. Consultors include four bishops, six priests, and ten lay persons. The next Plenary Assembly of the Council will take place in November 2008 in Rome.

Professor Alvaré received her law degree at Cornell University in 1984 and a master's degree in systematic theology from The Catholic University of America in 1989. After practicing with the Philadelphia law firm of Stradley, Ronon, Stevens & Young, specializing in commercial litigation and free exercise of religion matters, Professor Alvaré worked for three years at the Office of General Counsel for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, where she drafted amicus briefs in leading U.S. Supreme Court cases concerning abortion, euthanasia and the Establishment Clause. For the next ten years, she worked with the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities at the NCCB. There, she lobbied, testified before federal congressional committees, addressed university audiences, and appeared on hundreds of television and radio programs on behalf of the U.S. Catholic bishops. She also assisted the Holy See on matters concerning women, marriage and the family, and respect for human life.

Professor Alvaré chaired the commission investigating clerical abuse in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and remains a consultant to the U.S. bishops marriage committee as well as an ABC News consultant. Her scholarship regularly treats current controversies about marriage, parenting, and the new reproductive technologies.

Hayward joined representatives of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Asian American Justice Center, the Advancement Project, and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in a panel discussion entitled "Barriers to the Right to Vote."

"A Yahoo-Microsoft merger would primarily be designed to attack Google," said Hazlett.

Microsoft offered in January to buy Yahoo in a $42 billion deal rejected by Yahoo as being too low. Instead Yahoo has being looking for partners with whom to stave off Microsoft's attempts at a takeover. Yahoo's announcement last week of a test to outsource advertising to Google raised concerns in Congress and elsewhere that cooperation between the two companies could harm competition.

Yahoo-Google Alliance could bring antitrust scrutiny, The International Herald Tribune, April 14, 2008. By Diane Bartz.

Excerpt:
"Yahoo's attempt to form an alliance with Google to stave off Microsoft could run into more trouble with antitrust regulators that Microsoft's unwelcome takeover bid.

"While Yahoo is seeking a business partnership with Googe - unlike the outright merger that Microsoft wants - legal experts say any deal between the world's two largest Internet search services would draw heavy scrutiny from U.S. and European competition regulators.

"'The Justice Department would certainly want to take a serious look at that because it would mean that a firm that would want to take advertisements or to place advertisements would have only one place to go,' said Aaron Edlin, who teaches law and economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

"In recent years, Web search services have taken over from once-popular portals or home pages, like AOL, MSN or Yahoo's own home page, as the primary starting point for many consumers seeking information on the Internet.

"Google held a 59.2 percent share of the U.S. Web search market in February, compared with Yahoo's 21.6 percent and Microsoft's 9.6 percent, the research company comScore said."

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Read more about these outstanding new hires.

McCabe and Inglis tested how applying the two cost-shifting measures affected agreement in staged pretrial settlements. McCabe remarked that "our studies suggest those types of changes to the law are overrated and that we won't see much of an effect."

"So far in the lab what we're finding is that probably the most important changes to the law are the changes that overcome the breakdowns when people meet face to face," McCabe said. "I don't think changes to the process itself will have dramatic improvements. It's just wishful thinking and special-interest thinking."

McCabe will present these and other results from related work at the Economics Institutes for Judges program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, this spring.

Tort Reform's Human Touch, ABA Journal, April 2008. By Jenny B. Davis.

Excerpt:
"In their study, Using Economics Experiments to Evaluate Tort Reform Proposals, issued by George Mason Uni­ver­sity’s Mercatus Center last November, the pair tested, in part, how applying the two cost-shifting measures influenced how often subjects reached agreements in staged pretrial settlements.

"Playing the lawyer roles were eight undergrads divided into two groups—plaintiff and defense. Opposing counsel were then paired off and asked to come to a monetary agreement in four abstract cases, meaning they were given no facts, just numbers: the settlement range of such cases and a figure indicating the credibility of the case. McCabe, a professor of economics and law at George Mason, and Inglis, a research scientist specializing in tort reform issues at the university’s Center for the Study of Neuroeconomics, then changed the settlement situations in each case to test different litigation theories.

"When they applied the California Code of Civil Procedure § 998, which charges court costs to parties judged to have refused meritorious pretrial settlement offers, students settled their cases at a rate about equal to that of cases negotiated when both parties bore their own costs. And when they applied the stricter English Rule, which requires the losing party to pay the court costs of both sides, settlements dropped as much as 20 percent.

"What this shows, McCabe says, is that 'these various attempts to shift the burden of costs around in a way that should encourage people to settle did no such thing.'"

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Writing in the Financial Times, Hazlett points out that Bush Administration policies delayed the spectrum allocations, causing voice and data networks to suffer and stunting an array of wireless products. Yet in spite of those delays, carriers have been able to create new broadband networks that share bandwidth among tens of millions of voice and data customers.

It's the spectrum, stupid, Financial Times, April 7, 2008. By Thomas Hazlett.

Excerpt:
"On one stratagem or another, regulators have bottled up the rich, bountiful spectrum of the TV band for decades. This is senseless carnage for the high-tech economy. Over the past 22 years, the 'digital TV' transition – now scheduled for midnight, Feb. 17, 2009, when over-the-air analogue broadcasting is to cease – has been the prime culprit. But for the last seven years this perpetrator had inside help.

"The Bush administration, getting settled into its new digs in March 2001, began reading up and found out about the dreadfully slow-moving process to release TV airwaves for competitive use. They quickly moved to slow it down further.

"In 1997, legislation mandated that auctions of licences allocated TV band spectrum take place by June 2002. The George W. Bush White House investigated. It found the economy was bad and the stock market was worse. The wireless carriers said that they preferred not to have more competitive bandwidth released, and the government revenue forecasters advised that licence bids would be modest. The administration declared an additional multi-year auction delay a 'win-win'.

"It is easy to lose things; here regulators saw only the receipts and the incumbent interests, and lost about 300m consumers in the crowd. Voice and data networks have suffered, and the anti-technology policy has stunted an array of wireless products.

"Where lust for auction revenue has been tamed, better rules have unleashed torrents of innovation. In 1988, the FCC abandoned mandates that cellular operators deploy particular technologies. This was a 'giveaway' to cellular licensees, who acquired valuable rights. But freedom drives productive solutions. A stunning example is found in wireless broadband. As of June 2007 (the latest figures available), the FCC reported some 35m high-speed mobile subscribers, up from zero three years earlier. Even without the long-delayed spectrum allocations, carriers are able to create new broadband networks that intensely share bandwidth among tens of millions of voice and data customers.

"Such efficiencies are precisely what we ought to be facilitating. Dribbling out key inputs so as to hear tax collectors cackle is the government equivalent of fool’s gold. It is only a 'win-win' if you are forgetting to count what really matters."

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Commenting in a California newspaper article, Professor of Economics and Law Kevin McCabe said that the link between sex and greed goes back hundreds of thousands of years to men's evolutionary role as provider or resource gatherer to attract women.

"Risk-taking is a natural way of increasing your relative success, but, of course, there's a downside to it: what we're seeing right now in the economy," said McCabe.

The Stanford study is part of the growing field of neuroeconomics, in which brain biology is studied in combination with psychology and economics in an attempt to explain why individuals make the financial decisions they do.

McCabe holds appointments at George Mason's Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science, the Mercatus Center, and Krasnow Institute. He has written or co-written over 50 articles on market design, industrial organization, game theory, monetary theory, behavioral economics, and experimental economics and has been coprincipal investigator on many National Science Foundation grants, including a recent NSF study on "Brain Function and Economic Decision Making, 2001-2003."

Money on his mind could be sexy sign, The (Hayward, CA) Daily Review, April 5, 2008. By Seth Borenstain.

Excerpt:
"A new brain-scan study may help explain what's going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles -- sex.

"When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such as a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported.

"The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken.

"'You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area,' said Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist.

"Their research appears in the current edition of the peer-reviewed journal NeuroReport. "

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Somin remarked in an op-ed in National Review Online that the winner of this fall's presidential election could ultimately appoint justices who would determine whether Kelo will be overruled or limited in its impact in the future. 

Second, the next president could help protect property rights through the legislative process, supporting passage of the Property Rights Protection Act and broadening its scope.  

Last, Somin points out, the next president could strengthen President Bush's June 2006 executive order on eminent domain in which federal agencies are forbidden to enact condemnations intended to "merely…advance[e] the economic impact of private parties."

Kelo, M.I.A., National Review Online, April 2, 2008. By Ilya Somin. 

Excerpt:
"Some may assume that presidential action is unnecessary because the problem has already been solved by the legislative backlash against Kelo. Forty-two states have indeed passed legislation seeking to curb eminent-domain authority. However, the majority of the new laws are likely to be ineffective. California, New York, New Jersey, and Texas are among the major states that have enacted purely cosmetic reforms or none at all.

"Legislators have found many ways to produce bills that appear to protect property rights without actually doing so. The most common tactic is that of allowing economic-development condemnations to continue under the guise of alleviating 'blight.' Many states define 'blight' so broadly that almost any neighborhood qualifies.

"Widespread ignorance probably plays the key role in stymieing legislative reform of the kind voters want. Much specialized knowledge is required to tell the difference between an effective 'anti-Kelo' bill and one that is just for show. Most voters lack the ability and the incentive to scrutinize such details closely. A recent Saint Consulting Group survey showed that only 21 percent of Americans know whether their state has enacted eminent-domain-reform legislation since Kelo, and only 13 percent know whether their state's legislation is likely to be effective or not. Such ignorance makes it easy for state officials to pass off cosmetic legislation as genuine 'reform.'"

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Instead, said Hazlett, referring to National Association of Broadcasters protests, "These interests emphatically claim that they oppose the merger because it will lead to a monopoly that will harm consumers. This fierce opposition is powerful evidence in itself that AM/FM radio-'free radio'-competes with satellite radio, and reveals the true concern of terrestrial stations: that the merger will create a stronger rival better able to meet the needs of consumers."

State AGs give DoJ, FCC serious static over XM-Sirius merger, Ars Technica, March 28, 2008. By Matthew Lasar.

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