Since publication of the earliest known law review symposium in 1889, tens of thousands of symposia, colloquies, and special issues have been published. During the period 1980 to 1990 alone, almost 14,000 symposium articles were listed in Legal Resource Index on the LEXIS database. Few issues of the weekly Current Index to Legal Periodicals do not contain a listing for at least one symposium. Indeed, there has been approximately a two-fold increase in the number of symposium-type issues in the last decade alone.

What accounts for this increase? Does it reflect some deeper shift in the way we think and write about the law? And does it have implications for the future of legal publishing? This article examines the proliferation of the symposium issue and what that proliferation indicates about the state of legal scholarship.