The USC-Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics, the James Irvine Foundation, and Harvard Law School are sponsoring this very interesting symposium at USC on Feb. 10 and 11. Here is a description:

his two day conference brings together prominent scholars working in law, economics, public policy, and political science seeking to better understand the fiscal challenges faced by the federal and state governments. Only an interdisciplinary approach can produce and assess policies that will tame the deficit, restructure entitlement programs to meet new realities, produce congressional rules to allow Congress to overcome collective action problems, and understand the relationship between the states and federal government as they deal with these and other fiscal issues.
The conference was designed to involve, in addition to the leading experts in the field, some scholars who may not have considered budget issues before, such as constitutional law scholars, and to encourage those who study state level issues to interact with those who focus more on federal and international issues. Each panel of related papers will be analyzed by an expert commentator and the remaining time will be devoted to discussion with participants
The conference begins at 10:00am on Friday February 10th. There will be a keynote address by the Former Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Holtz-Eakin at 6:00pm on Friday evening. The conference resumes at 9:00am on Saturday February 11th and concludes at 4:00pm. A schedule of the conference follows. You will be able to download papers before the conference, and see an up-to-date schedule, on our website http://lawweb.usc.edu/cslp/fiscal_06index.html
If you are interested in attending, please RSVP to Betsey Hawkins at [email protected] or call (213) 821-5438 before February 5th. Although you are welcome to drop in to any panel of the conference without RSVPing, we do need to know if you plan to attend the Friday night dinner or lunch on either day. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the conference organizers, Beth Garrett, [email protected], or Elizabeth Graddy, [email protected].