If you're a symposium editor for a law review, you probably find that it's hard to pick a topic for a symposium that will persuade well-known authors to write for your journal. After all, if invitees have good enough reputations that you want them to participate in your issue without knowing what they'll submit, chances are that they could write on a topic of their choice and get published in a top journal. So what to do?

  One great idea is to pick a symposium topic on the work of a particular famous scholar (or even a particularly famous article). Pick a scholar who has had a lot of influence in his or her field, and who is still around and would really appreciate the recognition.

  Why is this a good strategy? Well, first of all, your list of symposium contributors will start with the author himself. If you honor someone with a symposium, you can be pretty sure they'll want to participate. And then the author who is being honored will help you pick other people who might contribute to the symposium. The BigWig author will probably help you get other BigWig authors to contribute, and the other BigWigs will be more likely to contribute because it's their friend the main BigWig author who is asking. On the whole, this is much more likely to lead to a well-attended symposium with top authors and fresh articles than the usual process of picking a generic "hot" topic.