Introduction

The Richard J. Childress Memorial Lecture has become the highpoint of the academic year at Saint Louis University School of Law. The Lecture, which honors the memory of a long-time dean and member of our faculty,[1] has been delivered each fall beginning in 2000 by a distinguished scholar on an important legal subject. Dean Jeffrey Lewis’s vision of the program was not simply to produce a typical speech on an academic topic, but to commission a preeminent scholar to write a substantial article on a critical issue and to invite responses from other thoughtful scholars and activists. Our Law Journal annually publishes the article that grows out of the Childress Lecture and the comments and responses it provokes. The first two such programs and volumes provided stimulating articles by distinguished academics on important legal issues.[2] This year’s contributions by Professor Thomas W. Merrill on The Making of the Second Rehnquist Court: A Preliminary Analysis [3] and by the respondents again far exceed the ambitious standard set for the Lecture and its accompanying issue of the Law Journal