Participants and a breif background on each:

Richard Brenneman
Richard Brenneman is a practicing attorney in Santa Maria, California with the firm of Chern and Brenneman. He is a graduate of Seattle University with a degree in biology (1969) and of Gonzaga University Law School. He has been twice voted the lawyer of the year by the Central California Trial Lawyers Association and in 1997 named as one of the top ten lawyers in California by the California Bar Journal. He represented Adams Brothers Farm in its successful suit against the County of Santa Barbara that reversed the wetland designation of its property. The suit resulted in punitive damage assessment not only against the county but also against two county employees and the consultant who recommended the wetland designation.

Michael Brown
Michael Brown is an attorney with a practice that specializes in eminent domain law. He has served as mayor of Riviera Beach Florida since 1999. As mayor he is aggressively pursuing the economic development of this city. His plan includes the use of public condemnation to acquire property for other private use to enhance the cities tax base. His aim is to enhance the overall quality of life for all residents of Riviera Beach through economic opportunities and new development. From the City's website "Mayor Brown is committed to the completion of the Harbor Village Redevelopment Project. He envisions it becoming an international destination spot, helping to drive up property values and helping to make other businesses want to relocate here. He also envisions that Harbor Village will help cultivate civic pride. "

Rick Cole
Rick Cole was appointed City Manager of Ventura in April 2004. Called "one of Southern California's most visionary planning thinkers" by the Los Angeles Times, he previously served six years as City Manager of Azusa, California. Under Cole's leadership, Azusa was described as the "most improved city in the San Gabriel Valley" by the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. He brings an unusual background to city management, having previously served as the Southern California Director of the Local Government Commission, Mayor of Pasadena, Executive Director of the West Hollywood Marketing Corporation and co-founder of the Pasadena Weekly newspaper.

William Fischel
William Fischel is the Patricia F and William B. Hale '44 Professor in Arts and Science at Dartmouth College where he has been on the Economics faculty since 1973. His research focuses on the law and economics of regulatory takings and on the economics of local government, especially the Tiebout hypothesis, zoning, property taxation, and school finance. His latest book, The Homeowner Hypothesis was published by Harvard University Press in 2001. He has written two previous books: The Economics of Zoning Law (John Hopkins University Press, 1985) and Regulatory Takings (Harvard University Press, 1995.

Willis A. Frambach
Willis A. (Bill) Frambach (JD South Bay University, BS UCLA) is a retired attorney from Seal Beach, California. He has been a member of the Los Angeles County Central Committee and the California Central Committee of one of the major political parties. He managed and co-managed several successful campaigns for California State Assembly. He has also served, at various times, as Judge Pro Tem of the California Superior Court. His active practice was in Family Law and he was successful in 19 of 21 cases taken to the California Court of Appeals. He has over the course of year developed an expertise in takings and public trust cases with an archive of relevant cases that he is makes available for research purposes

Gary Libecap
Gary Libecap's is the Anheuser Busch Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies, Economics and Law at the University of Arizona. He is President of the Economic History Association 2005-06; President of the Western Economics Association International 2005-06. His research focuses on property rights and economic behavior as they apply to national resource use and environmental quality. Using contemporary and historical data he has analyzed varying property rights and regulatory arrangements regarding the common pool. His current research is on western water rights and markets.
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Carol McAusland
Carol McAusland is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at University of Maryland. She conducts research on the overlap between trade and environmental policy. Her past research has covered topics such as the environmental ramifications of trade liberalization, the design of trade policies for stemming biological invasions, and the role of intellectual property rights in brain drain. She is a member of the editorial council of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Her recent publications include "Harmonizing Tailpipe Policy in Symmetric Countries: Improve the Environment, Improve Welfare?" Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (2005) and "Voting for Pollution Policy: The Importance of Income Inequality and Openness to Trade" Journal of International Economics (2003).

Thomas Miceli
Tom Miceli (PhD Brown University) is Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut where in 2004 he received the Grillo Family Faculty Award for Excellence in Research. He has published widely and significantly in the area of Law and Economics. He has published three books The Economic Approach to Law, Stanford University Press, 2004. Economics of the Law: Torts, Contracts, Property, Litigation, Oxford University Press, 1997 and, most related to this conference Compensation for Regulatory Takings: An Economic Analysis with Applications, Volume 1 in The Economics of Legal Relationships JAI Press,1996. With a coauthor, Kathleen Segerson, he has published some of the most important papers on the economics of takings.

Andrew Morriss
Andrew P. Morriss is Galen J. Roush Professor of Business Law & Regulation and Director of the Center for Business Law & Regulation at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, Cleveland, OH. He is also a Research Fellow of the NYU Center for Labor and Employment Law, a Senior Fellow at the Property & Environment Research Center, Bozeman, Montana; a Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University; and a regular visiting professor at Universidad Francisco Marroquín, in Guatemala.
He received his A.B. degree from Princeton University, his J.D. and a masters degree in public affairs from The University of Texas at Austin, and his Ph.D. (Economics) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He is the author or coauthor of more than forty book chapters and scholarly articles, including Signaling and Precedent in Federal District Court Opinions (with Michael Heise and Gregory Sisk) 13 SUPREME COURT ECONOMIC REVIEW 63-98 (2005); Defining What to Regulate: Silica & the Problem of Regulatory Categorization (with Susan E. Dudley), ADMINISTRATIVE LAW REVIEW (forthcoming 2006); and The Public-Private Security Partnership: Counterterrorism Considerations for Employers in a Post-9/11 World, in WORK PLACE PRIVACY HERE AND ABROAD: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 58TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON LABOR (Kluwer 2006). He is the co-editor of CROSS-BORDER HUMAN RESOURCES, LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT ISSUES: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 54TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON LABOR (Samuel Estreicher and Andrew Morriss, eds.) (Kluwer 2004); PROPERTY STORIES (editor, with Gerald Korngold) (Foundation Press, 2004); and THE COMMON LAW AND THE ENVIRONMENT (Roger Meiners and Andrew Morriss, eds.) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
He shares his home in Ohio with his wife, two daughters, eight cats, one dog, and six horses.

Ed Nosal
Ed Nosal (PhD Queen's University) is Senior Research Advisor with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Before joining the Fed he was an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Waterloo. He has been a Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore, University of New South Wales (Australia) and the University of British Columbia. Included among his most recent publications are "A Model of (the Threat of) Counterfeiting" Journal of Monetary Economics (forthcoming), Campers versus Loggers: Compensaton for the Taking of Property Rights" Journal of Law Economics and Organization (2005) and "The Taking of Land: Market Value Compensation Should be Paid" Journal of Public Economics (2001).

Florenz Plassmann
Florenz Plassman (PhD Virginia Tech 1997) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Binghamton University. He has been a Visiting Research Scholar with the International Monetary Fund and a Research Associate at Virginia Tech. He has made important contributions in several public policy areas. Included among his recent publications "Preferences, Income and the Environment: Understanding the Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis" American Journal of Agricultural Economics (forthcoming) and, with Nicolas Tideman "Fair and Efficient Compensation for Taking Property under Uncertainty" Journal of Public Economic Theory (August, 2005).

Perry Shapiro
Perry Shapiro is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After receiving his doctorate at the Berkeley, he taught at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and the London School of Economics before accepting a position at UCSB. In 1990 he was the Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in residence at the Research School of Social Science at the Australian National University with a subsequent adjunct appointment at the Federalism Research Centre of RSSS. He has held the position of Professorial Fellow at Melbourne University and is currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of Adelaide.
The research record spans a number of applied and theoretical areas. Shapiro is most well know for his paper on the demand for publicly provided goods. The work pioneered the econometric analysis of quantal survey responses and to a large extend foreshadowed the subsequent use of such analysis in contingent evaluation studies. Various papers on this subject were published in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Record among others. A second area in which Shapiro's work has had considerable impact is the economic analysis of property law. An original paper, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, proposed that efficiency required that no compensation be paid to landowners who lost their property to the public through its use of eminent domain. The result was controversial and spawned a spate of imaginative papers, built on the theme developed by Shapiro and his coauthors, on the subject of compensation for public condemnation.

Jacqueline Stevens
Jacqueline Stevens (PhD UC Berkeley) is an Assistant Professor in the Law and Society Program at UCSB. She writes about how laws create hereditary membership groups that seem to be natural. Her focus is on the role law plays in constituting the nation, ethnicity, race, family, kinship, and sexuality. She is also interested in the role of government research in constituting taxonomies of race and ethnicity through the research done on the Human Genome Project. She is presently writing two book manuscripts: States without Nations and The Human Being Project. Her recent publications include "The Morals of Genealogy", Political Theory (August 2003) and "Symbolic Matter. DNA and Other Linguistic Stuff" Social Text (Spring 2002).

T. Nicolaus Tideman
Nic Tideman (PhD Chicago) is a Professor of Economics at Virginia Tech. During his distinguished career he has served as a Visiting Scholar with the American Institute for Economics Research, Visiting Professor at the University of Buckingham, Research Associate at the Kennedy School at Harvard and a Senior Staff Economist with the President's Council of Economic Advisors. He has written on many different and important subjects. He is well know for his work on Public Choice with frequently cited articles in that area. Among his most recent contributions is the paper with Florenz Plassmann , "Fair and Efficient Compensation for Taking Property under Uncertainty" Journal of Public Economic Theory (August, 2005).