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2008 Minnesota Law Review Symposium
Law & Politics in the 21st Century
October 17, 2008
8:15 a.m. to 4:15 p.m.
University of Minnesota Law School
Lockhart Hall (Room 25)
On October 17, 2008, the Minnesota Law Review will host its annual symposium, “Law & Politics in the 21st Century.” The event is scheduled to take place following the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, and prior to the general election. The discussion will examine the ways in which political factors increasingly affect the development of the law, and will feature two keynote speakers: D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh and New Republic Columnist Benjamin Wittes. The symposium will also focus on three panel topics: “Politics and the Judiciary,” “Current Issues in Election Law,” and “Beyond Bush: The Future of Executive Power.”
Several of the country’s most distinguished scholars will participate. Professors Lee Epstein (Northwestern University), Ward Farnsworth (Boston University), Michael Gerhardt (North Carolina), and Tim Johnson (Minnesota) will first address issues relating to the politicization of the judiciary. Discussion topics include: the merits of various modes of judicial selection, the political economy of judging, and the factors that cause Supreme Court justices to dissent from the bench.
The second panel consists of Professors Heather Gerken (Yale), Ellen Katz (Michigan), Nate Persily (Columbia), and Terry Smith (Fordham). The panelists will tackle several important issues in election law. Debate will center on the Supreme Court’s four election law cases of the 2007-08 Term, which raised issues from the constitutionality of voter identification requirements to the scope of political party autonomy to control candidates’ access to the ballot.
Finally, Professors Steven Calabresi (Northwestern University), Charles Cameron (Princeton), William Howell (Chicago) and Heidi Kitrosser (Minnesota) will address both the descriptive and normative scope of executive power. Professors Kitrosser and Calabresi will analyze unitary executive theory and will engage in a normative debate about its validity. Professors Howell and Cameron, the panel’s political scientists, will provide empirical assessments of executive power.
The symposium seeks to improve on last year’s well-attended event on low-wage workers, which attracted almost 200 attendees. For more information about the symposium, contact the Symposium Editor for Volume 93, Jeff Justman, at just0052@umn.edu; or Professor David Stras, the Law Review Advisor and co-director of the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Law & Politics, at dstras@umn.edu.
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