The Law Review Symposium: A Hard Party to Crash for Crits, Feminists, and Other Outsiders

Abstract

Law review symposia are a major means by which legal developments establish and validate themselves. They can highlight developments in an established field, like same-sex marriage in family law, or cover an entirely new field such as game theory or rational choice. These symposia and their authors help establish and delimit the legal canon. Following up on a previous article exploring the law review symposium issue, this study of subsequent law review symposia shows how certain recurrent figures and groups tend to dominate symposia on mainstream issues, while outsider scholars remain poorly represented and ghettoized to symposia on race and civil rights.

Keywords: legal scholarship, legal education, law reviews, symposium publishing, outsider scholars, discrimination