@@ Since Rizzis (1990) seminal work on Relativized Minimality, it has become clear that there are two main factors involved in forming a legitimate syntactic dependency, namely, identification vs. formal licensing. The former, encoded by antecedent government (Chomsky 1982, 1986) and generalized binding (Aoun 1986), has been the focus of inquiry in the GB literature, while continuing to prosper in the form of Agree under the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 2000). The latter notion, by contrast, receives relatively little attention in the form of head/theta-government (Aoun et al. 1987; Rizzi 1990), and has almost lost all its theoretical status in the post-GB era. In face of strong evidence from Chinese extraction and ellipsis, this paper proposes to reinvent the notion of formal licensing in terms of sisterhood, and reinstates it as a built-in requirement of Merge, i.e., an "insurance" on the behalf of the No Tampering Condition (Chomsky 2007, 2008) such that no phonetic content will be lost in an unwarranted manner.