Richard A. Epstein is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1972. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985 and a Senior Fellow of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago Medical School since 1983. His books include Torts (1999), Principles for a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty with the Common Good (1998), and Mortal Peril: Our Inalienable Rights to Health Care? (1997). He has taught courses on a variety of legal subjects, including communications, contracts, criminal law, and health law and policy.

Donald J. Palmisano, M.D., J.D., a general and vascular surgeon, was elected to the American Medical Association (AMA) Board of Trustees in 1996 and reelected in 1999. He is chairman of the Compensation Committee and serves on the Executive Committee and the Finance Committee. Dr. Palmisano is a former president of the Louisiana State Medical Society, and he is the point person for the AMA on patient privacy and medical record confidentiality. Dr. Palmisano is a frequent lecturer on a wide variety of medical and legal topics, including informed consent, risk management, managed care, and tort reform. His medical and legal publications include Informed Consent—A Survival Guide, which he co-wrote, and the risk management section on informed consent for the American College of Surgeons’ book Professional Liability/Risk Management.

Ben J. Wattenberg is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the moderator of the weekly PBS program Think Tank and writes a weekly newspaper column that appears in 200 newspapers. He has been the host-essayist of several public affairs documentary televison series, including Ben Wattenberg at Large and In Search of the Real America in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and he has had a creative role in many other television documentaries. Mr. Wattenberg is now working on a major project, "The First Measured Century," a three-hour prime-time PBS special and an accompanying book, looking at the twentieth century in America through the lens of data. He is the author of eight books, including Values Matter Most, The Birth Dearth, The First Universal Nation, and The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong, and he is the coauthor with Richard M. Scammon of The Real Majority.