Politics, and Economics at George Mason University, a senior fellow of the Goldwater Institute, a senior scholar of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and a fellow of the International Centre for Economic Research in Turin, Italy. During the Fall 2008 Semester, Professor Zywicki was the Searle Fellow of the George Mason University School of Law and was a 2008–09 W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Arch W. Shaw National Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. He has lectured and consulted with government officials around the world, including Iceland, Italy, Japan, and Guatemala. In 2006, Zywicki was a member of the United States Department of Justice Study Group on "Identifying Fraud, Abuse and Errors in the United States Bankruptcy System". He was on the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College from 2005 to 2009. Zywicki is a trustee of Yorktown University, a conservative for-profit Internet-based university. Legal scholarship and activities Zywicki has testified on numerous occasions in his personal capacity before committees and subcommittees of the United States Senate and United States House of Representatives on issues of bankruptcy and consumer credit. In 2005, he wrote at The Volokh Conspiracy that "the growth in subprime lending is not creating overwhelming debt burdens for low-income households." During the run-up to the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), a law that was heavily lobbied for by the financial services industry and that made it more difficult for consumers to discharge their credit card debts in bankruptcy, Professor Zywicki testified before Congress that the law was likely to reduce the costs of debt to all borrowers by reducing losses to credit card lenders: [W]hen creditors are unable to collect debts because of bankruptcy, some of those losses are inevitably passed on to responsible Americans who live up to their financial obligations. . . . We all pay for bankruptcy abuse in higher down payments, higher interest rates, and higher costs for goods and services. This bankruptcy 'tax' takes many forms. It is obviously reflected in higher interest rates.... It is [also] reflected in shorter grace periods for paying bills and higher penalty fees and late-charges for those who miss payments ... [R]educing the number of strategic bankruptcies will reduce the bankruptcy tax paid by every American family .... These reforms will make the bankruptcy system more fair, equitable, and