Editor's foreword.

• Author: Bonventre, Vincent Martin

State Constitutional Commentary is sweet sixteen! Yes, this is the sixteenth annual issue. An adaptation of State Constitutional Commentaries & Notes--a compact political science quarterly published at Rutgers University under the direction of Professor Stanley Friedelbaum--State Constitutional Commentary has become a mainstay of the Albany Law Review and of the national scholarly literature on America's state courts, state public law, judicial federalism, and indeed, all aspects of state adjudication, fundamental law, and relations cum dynamics with the jurisprudence of the Federal Supreme Court.

Beyond that, the Albany Law Review now hosts a State Constitutional Commentary symposium. This annual roundtable of scholars and jurists, named after Lawrence H. Cooke--a 1937 graduate of Albany Law School, former Chief Judge of New York, and first chairperson of the journal's Board of Editors--has become one of the most eagerly anticipated, well-attended, important, and exciting events of the Law School's academic year.

Indeed, the symposium held two years past featured every member of New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals. (1) The enthusiasm of the judges and the members of the bench bar, academy, and student body in attendance at that event was the stimulus for New York Appeals, an annual issue of the Law Review inaugurated last year with an in-depth study of each of the current members of the state's high court. The symposium last year focused on the causes, ramifications, responses, and remedies for wrongful convictions. That event, in turn, engendered yet another special annual issue, Miscarriages of Justice. (2) The inaugural edition focused on the Benthamite notion that it is better for ten guilty persons to be acquitted than for one innocent person to be convicted--is at the printer as this is being written.

That brings us to this year's State Constitutional Commentary symposium: Great Women, Great Chiefs. Chief Justices Margaret Marshall of Massachusetts, Marsha Ternus of Iowa, and Jean Toal of South Carolina--three extraordinary women and jurists who have headed their respective states' high courts and judicial branches--spent the day at the Law School. At that symposium, they were, in order, introduced by Albany Law School Professors Donna Young, Rosemary Queenan, and Mary Lynch, each of whom provided an outline of the ground breaking careers of the three Chief Justices as well as of some of the landmarks and milestones that...