CFP for the Green Bag’s second micro-symposium

With our first micro-symposium available online and either in print (in the Journal of Law) or on press (in the Green Bag), now seems like a good time to invite submissions for our next one. And so . . .

The Green Bag invites submissions for its second micro-symposium, to be published in 2013 in the Green Bag and the Journal of Law.

Theme: Professor Suzanna Sherry’s Why We Need More Judicial Activism, which is available now on SSRN and sometime soon in a festschrift for Professor Murray Dry of Middlebury College. Sherry’s article offers a compact yet wide-ranging combination of the theoretical, the empirical, and the practical to support her argument, which concludes,

“In evaluating the appropriate role of the judiciary in a democracy, theory can take us only so far. No theory can draw the line between too many and too few judicial invalidations, nor specify parameters or constraints that produce a perfect balance. We are left with the pragmatic task of making the best trade-off between false negatives and false positives, and only an examination of the actual consequences of judicial activism or restraint can inform that decision. What such an examination teaches us is that too little judicial activism is worse than too much. We most regret the cases in which the Supreme Court failed to prevent popular majorities from making serious constitutional mistakes. If we wish to avoid such regrets in the future, we should encourage more judicial activism, not less.”

Invited topics: Any theoretical, empirical, or practical commentary that will help our readers better understand Sherry’s argument – its correctness or incorrectness, the good or bad uses to which it might be put, the consequences if her views were to prevail or not, or anything else of the sort. Sherry will, of course, have the last word, if she wants it. Some micro-symposium topics may lend themselves readily to humorous submissions. We suspect this one does not.

Length limit: No longer than 500 words, including title, text, footnotes, and everything else.

Deadline: Finished works must be received at [email protected] by June 1, 2013. No extensions will be granted and no post-deadline tinkering will be permitted.

Selection criteria: Works will be selected for publication by the Green Bag and Professor Sherry based on how novel, interesting, well-written, good-spirited, and potentially useful they are.

Inquiries: Please write to us at [email protected].