Introduction to Symposium

• Citation: Vol. 69 No. 3
• Publication year: 2018

Introduction to Symposium

Gary J. Simson

[Page 671]

Symposium Introduction: Disruptive Innovation in Criminal Defense

by Gary J. Simson^*

Every year the Mercer Law Review asks a member of the Mercer law faculty to serve as a liaison between the Law Review editors and the various individuals who will be speaking at the annual Law Review symposium and contributing to the subsequent print symposium. I was invited to serve in that role for this year's Symposium on Disruptive Innovation in Criminal Defense. When I accepted, I expected the experience to be a good one for me, but it wasn't. It was outstanding.

All too many symposia are largely collections of articles that present in shortened form ideas that the authors have already published elsewhere (once, if not multiple times!). This is definitely not one of those symposia. The authors—a virtual Who's Who of leading criminal justice scholars from across the country—certainly had plenty of previously published work to draw on. By any measure, they are an unusually prolific group. However, they embraced the challenge presented by the Symposium's theme of disruptive innovation in criminal defense, put on their thinking caps—though not so tightly as to leave no room for imagination—and produced a symposium that offers a remarkably wide range of creative and thought-provoking ideas. This is truly the type of symposium issue that law review editors and scholars dream of.

I leave it to you, the readers, to confirm for yourselves that these articles are as good as I claim. In the remainder of this introduction, I just want to comment briefly on several things that helped make the Symposium so special but that you can't find in the pages of the articles that follow.

[Page 672]

First and foremost, the origins of this Symposium were unique. It grew out of one of the many "discussion groups" held at the 2017 Annual Conference of the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS). Each "discussion group" at SEALS is essentially a workshop session on a particular topic with roughly ten to fifteen faculty members from various law schools presenting and exchanging ideas; the conference also includes panels, which take the standard form that panels usually take of three to five people speaking in sequence for thirty to forty minutes apiece. Although the conference did not take place until August 2017, the conference organizers had settled by December 2016 on the list of discussion groups and panels, and a discussion group...