The Wisconsin Law Review is pleased to announce its 2012 annual symposium: "30 Years of Comparative Institutional Analysis: A Celebration of Neil Komesar." The event will be held in:
Lubar Commons (Room 7200), University of Wisconsin Law School
975 Bascom Mall, Madison WI 53706
(Lubar Commons is located on the 7th floor of the law school, in the faculty tower.)
Panelists' Papers (password protected)
Comparative Institutional Analysis
Neil Komesar is among the most influential scholars in the history of the University of Wisconsin Law School. Indeed, he is one of the true giants of American legal theory of the past half century. His work on comparative institutional analysis has informed the work of leading scholars around the world in a staggering range of fields. From property law, land use, and environmental law, to international dispute resolution, global governance, and EU law, to statutory interpretation, separation of powers, and civil rights, there is scarcely an area of legal inquiry that has not been shaped by Komesar's insights.
What are those insights? Three stand out as primary. First, every legal decision is, at bottom, a choice about who decides--most basically, the courts, the market, or the political process. Second, each of these decision-making institutions is, always and everywhere, radically imperfect. Thus, institutional choice is always difficult and always requires comparison of flawed alternatives. It is never enough to understand the flaws or strengths of a single institution in isolation. Third, and finally, the performance of institutions is predominantly a function of social and political pressures from below rather than the motives or competence of the officials staffing them at the top. Together, these three insights produced a research program of paradigm-shifting breadth and ambition. Just as important, they produced a remarkably powerful--and generalizable--analytic approach for carrying that program into effect in any field of legal inquiry.
Panelists
Andrew Coan (University of Wisconsin Law School)
Daniel Cole (Indiana University Maurer School of Law)
William Eskridge, Jr. (Yale Law School)
Shubha Ghosh (University of Wisconsin Law School)
Michele Goodwin (University of Minnesota Law School)
Neil Komesar (University of Wisconsin Law School)
Miguel Maduro (European University Institute)
Victoria Nourse (Georgetown Law Center)
Paul Olszowka (Barnes & Thornburg LLP)
Edward Rubin (Vanderbilt Law School)
Gregory Shaffer (University of Minnesota Law School)
David Skeel (University of Pennsylvania Law School)
Matthew Stephenson (Harvard Law School)
Peter Swire (The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law)
Wendy Wagner (The University of Texas School of Law)
