With the last academic year now behind us, George Mason University’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State is now looking forward to the coming year’s academic programs.

And we will start in September with an interesting, challenging, and timely subject: the relationship between federal agencies’ politically appointed leadership and the agencies’ bureaucratic personnel. Drawing inspiration from James. Q. Wilson’s famous book and Elena Kagan’s famous law review article, we are calling it “Bureaucracy and Presidential Administration: Modernizing the Civil Service and Political Leadership.”

The Gray Center is officially accepting paper proposals, for a research roundtable on September 19–20 at GMU’s Antonin Scalia Law School near Washington, D.C.

At the roundtable, authors will present preliminary drafts for discussion among other scholars and practitioners. The initial draft can be very short—even just 15 or 20 pages. Months later, more thorough drafts will be discussed at a December 6 public policy conference at GMU.

Full details are available on the Gray Center’s Medium page. If you would like to propose a paper, then email me (awhite36 [at] gmu [dot] edu) or the Center’s Deputy Director, Andrew Kloster (akloste [at] gmu [dot] edu). The Center happily offers honoraria to all authors and all non-author roundtable discussants.

Adam White is Assistant Professor of Law and Director of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.