Dear Readers:

This edition of FREE Insights gives a preview of the conference topics we have selected for 2010. We are now designing these programs, and we welcome your suggestions for speakers and funders.

Best,

John & Pete

FREE’s programs target (and hit) important decision makers and opinion leaders. We attract some of America’s most respected scholars. They offer constructive alternatives in a respectful, intellectually open, and honest setting. Using basic concepts from the fields of economics (micro and public choice theory), we explain how the market process, secure property rights, and our founding institutions foster a civil society and advance economic wellbeing. In 2010 we will offer the following programs:

Environmental Economics, Law, & Policy

A Program for Editors of Environmental & Natural Resources Law Reviews

No legal area has spawned more specialized law journals than environmental and natural resources law. Unlike other academic disciplines, where scholars submit their work to peers for review and publication, legal scholars publish the majority of their work in law reviews and journals managed and edited by law students. Yet these journals are highly influential. Using basic concepts from the fields of economics, science, and risk analysis, we will help editors of environmental and natural resources law reviews understand how the application of the analytical tools of economics fosters social wellbeing while enhancing environmental quality.

Expanding FREE’s Outreach to Religious Leaders: A mid-course evaluation

A Program for Social Entrepreneurs

The purpose of this meeting is to develop a strategic approach to expanding our very successful program for religious leaders from one to two conferences per year and to produce an anthology, tentatively titled Environmental Stewardship for Religious Leaders: A Primer. This book is modeled on our successful primer for federal judges, Federal Judge’s Desk Reference to Environmental Economics. Our goal is to have our book reviewed in religious publications, and adopted and distributed in divinity schools, churches, and at colleges and universities.

Personal Health Care Choices & Public Policy

A Program for Federal Judges, State Supreme Court Justices, & Law Professors

This is an area fraught with difficult problems and competing values. Economics offers some important insights. For example, is health care a classic economic good? If not, what are the implications for health care policy? Why is rationing a logical necessity? How should it be done? What are the predictable consequences of alternative means?

What about the end of life problem? Our ability to keep people “alive” in the most compromised states for extended periods of time is not an obvious good and is extremely costly. Would more financial cost to the parties involved lead to more responsible and humane choices? What are the implications of the lifestyle-behavioral impacts on demands for health care? These are a few of the questions motivating our design of this conference.

Terrorism, Civil Liberty, & National Security

A Program for Federal Judges, State Supreme Court Justices, & Law Professors

In response to judges’ evaluations, FREE’s conference on terrorism and civil liberties is again on our agenda. This topic was ranked the “most interesting and important” in our judicial survey, and our conferences on the topic receive rave reviews.

Calls for increased national security continue to threaten our civil liberties, and debate over this encroachment persists. How can we best address calls for increased national security? What are the tradeoffs we face? Will civil liberties in the U.S. give ground as they largely have in Europe? Many influential and far-reaching decisions are made from the bench thus an understanding of these issues is essential if we are to preserve both security and responsible liberty.

Our Environment: Economics, Ecology, & Ethics

A Program for Seminary Professors and Religious Leaders

It’s no accident that the Greek word “oikos” is the root of both economics and ecology. Economics explores the allocation of scarce resources. Since not all of our goals can be met simultaneously, and since environmental quality is only one of many worthy goals, we must make choices among competing values. Join us as we explore how our friend (and lecturer) Dwight Lee explains, “[W]hen properly understood, economics is not just a useful discipline, it is a noble one, concerned with promoting the highest aspirations of mankind — harmony, cooperation, tolerance, freedom, material prosperity, and human flourishing.”