Tomorrow, I’m speaking at the Barnes Symposium, an annual symposium sponsored by the University of South Carolina. I’ll be speaking about the role of international law in constitutional interpretation, a topic I’ve taken on at a previous symposium but which apparently needs even more discussion.
I’m obviously pleased to be invited to speak. My students are forced to listen to me, so it is always nice when someone voluntarily comes to listen to something I have to say (another reason I like blogging). I am doing a lot of symposia these days (let me indulge in some shameless self promotion here and here). In fact, I have agreed to speak at so many symposia this year that I am having trouble completing my larger traditional law review projects.
Is this a problem? For tenure purposes, it might be, but let me put that (very important) question aside for now. More generally, I’m interested in whether contributions to law symposia can be valuable legal scholarship.
Symposium contributions have a lot of advantages over the traditional law reviews. They are typically organized around a theme or topic, the contributions are usually solicited by a faculty member with some general knowledge of the field, and the contributions are necessarily shorter and more readable.
On the other hand, symposium contributions typically do not “count” for tenure. They are not generally taken quite a seriously as a full-blown law review article, and for that reason, scholars tend not to put their best work into such contributions.
I think this is a shame. A well-organized symposium issue should have at least as much, if not more intellectual value than a typical law review issue. The symposia system is a possible way to finesse the problem of law students “selecting” the leading law review articles by having faculty involved in the evaluation of scholars (although perhaps, not the scholarship).
No doubt, my pro-symposia view is fairly self-interested. There are obvious problems with too much reliance on symposia, but on the whole, I think that the greater prominence of symposia in legal scholarship is a positive thing. I would be curious to see if readers of this blog agree.
Posted by JulianKu on February 2, 2006 at 12:51 PM
Comments
Symposia are usually useless. The symposium inviters tend to invite profs who had something to say 20 years ago, but are just coasting now. The profs then write something meaningless to fill up space, and they save their good stuff for competitive admissions where they’ll need it for a good placement. The quality is usually pretty low.
Posted by: lawprof | Feb 3, 2006 10:33:03 AM
Julian,
I think this question is only really pressing for those in their first few years of teaching. After those first five years, you have tenure and can write symposia until you are blue in the face. I’m suspicious of tenure committee that only “count” traditional law review articles (I’m sure mine takes the same approach) because they are as real as any scholarship in law reviews. But I don’t think it really disadvantages us all that much to hold off on symposium work until tenure. And be real: do you think your tenure committee will wholly discount your Yale Law Journal piece because it will appear in a symposium? I think publishing in the YLJ can only be a strong plus in your file.
Posted by: Ethan Leib | Feb 2, 2006 5:45:02 PM