A guest post by Will Baude, Adam Chilton, and Anup Malani.

How can the distinctive methodology of law be pursued carefully and rigorously? Much of the core task of a lawyer, a judge, or a researcher amounts to assessing substantive legal materials, like constitutional provisions, legislation, or court decisions. But these materials are often canvassed and analyzed non-systematically. Although there are already extensive debates about how to interpret statutes or constitutional text or precedents, those debates tend to center on substantive disagreements about the legal effect of the provisions and not the more methodological question of *how* a given interpretive approach should be pursued. The academy can help by developing best practices for careful analysis.

On May 6th-7th, the University of Chicago Law Review will bring scholars together for a symposium on this subject: Developing Best Practices for Legal Analysis.  In addition to ourselves, the participants for the event include Oren Bar-Gill, Omri Ben-Shahar, Curtis Bradley, Melissa Carlson, Vince Chhabria, Frank Easterbrook, Richard Epstein, Richard Fallon, Tom Ginsburg, Abbe Gluck, Katerina Linos, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, Bernadette Meyler, Richard Posner, Fred Schauer, Lawrence Solum, Barbara Spellman, Nick Stephanopolous, Cass Sunstein, and Adrian Vermeule.