The Center for the Study of the Administrative State, at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, exists to encourage scholarship and debate regarding administrative law and the modern administrative state. It does this primarily by organizing roundtables and conferences encouraging and aiding new scholarship on significant issues.

Next spring, the Center will host a workshop on “Permits, Licenses, and the Administrative State,” to be followed by a public conference next autumn. Permits, licensing, and other ex ante regulatory approvals are a significant aspect of public administration, raising issues ranging from administrative law to constitutional law to political economy, yet they receive relatively little attention in traditional administrative law. The Center hopes to promote serious thinking on this subject, in order to help improve regulatory policy.

We hope to feature articles focused on subject-specific licensing issues, and also on bigger-picture questions regarding permits in public administration. We already have accepted proposals for several papers, but have space on the agenda for two more.

And so the Center would welcome paper proposals from any scholars interested in the subject. The roundtable will be April 12-13, 2018, with draft paper due April 2. (For purposes of the roundtable, we need only an initial draft; it needn’t be polished.) The public conference will be October 24, 2018. The Center will host both of these events at the Antonin Scalia Law School in Arlington, Virginia, and can happily offer a substantial honorarium to authors. Please send proposals to me, the Center’s director, at awhite36 (at) gum (dot) edu. Thanks.

Adam White is executive director of the Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, and a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.