The Forum's objective is to encourage the work of young scholars by providing experience in the pursuit of scholarship and the nature of the scholarly exchange. Meetings are held each spring, at Yale one year and Stanford the next.

Between twelve and twenty scholars (with one to seven years in teaching and who are not yet tenured) are chosen on a blind basis from among those submitting papers to present. Two senior scholars, not necessarily from Stanford or Yale, comment on each paper. The audience will include the invited young scholars, faculty from the host institutions, and invited guests. The goal is discourse on both the merits of particular papers and on appropriate methodologies for doing work in that genre. We hope that comment and discussion will communicate what counts as good work among successful senior scholars and will also challenge and improve the standards that now exist. The Forum also hopes to increase the sense of community among American legal scholars generally, particularly among new and veteran professors.

Each year the Forum invites submissions on selected topics in public and private law, legal philosophy, and law and humanities—alternating loosely between public law and humanities subjects in one year, and private and dispute resolution law in the next. The focus of the 12th session will be private law and dispute resolution. The topics to be addressed are:

• Antitrust
• Race, Markets, and Hollywood's Perpetual Antitrust Dilemma
• Bankruptcy
• The Chrysler Effect - The Impact of the Chrysler Bailout on Borrowing Costs
• Civil Litigation and Dispute Resolution
• Equal Opportunity for Arbitration
• When Rules are Rules - The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Institutions in Legal Interpretation
• Corporate and Securities Law
• Branching Restrictions, Financial Market Integration, and Firm Growth - Evidence from U.S. Banking Deregulations
• The Effects of Ownership and Stock Liquidity on the Timing of Repurchase Transactions
• Intellectual Property
• Expressive Incentives in Intellectual Property
• Folklore 2.0 - Why Remixing Tradition is the Best Way to Preserve It
• Patent Inflation
• Veblen Brands and Invisible Hands in the Market for Social Expression
• International Law
• A Unified Approach to Extraterritoriality
• Law and Policy Implementation
• What Police Learn From Lawsuits
• Property
• Boomtown and Ghost Town in Post-Soviet Ukraine - On Property, Personhood, and the New Objectivity
• States, Law, and Property Rights in West Africa
• Taxation
• Modeling Tax Law's Uncertainty
• The Distortionary Effects of Subsidies for Charity in a Federal System
• Torts
• Caring Objectively
• Mass Torts and Due Process