The Arizona Law Review, a journal published by University of Arizona students, will present a free, one-day symposium exploring the nature of political dialogue in contentious times.

Sponsored by the law firm of Polsinelli Shughart, the symposium brings together guest scholars from the UA James E. Rogers College of Law and other parts of the country. The symposium also received funding from the National Institute for Civil Discourse at the UA.

"We are thrilled to finally see to the civility conference happening. The conference has been the major endeavor of the Arizona Law Review over the past year," said Alexis Danneman, editor-in-chief of the Review.

Founded in 1959, the Arizona Law Review is a general-interest academic legal journal that is edited and published quarterly by UA law students, covering wide-ranging topics of law and policy.

During the event, experts will discuss the role of incivility in political discourse and whether there is a causal relationship between incivility and various kinds of harm, from physical violence to psychological harm, including subtle forms of discrimination.

The panelists are: 

• Bernard Harcourt, the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, who will discuss the relationship between minor disorderliness and political violence, drawing from and informing government, public policy and sociology studies.
• Arizona Law Vice Dean and Professor Marc Miller will speak with Yale Law School Professor Richard Brooks. Miller and Brooks will discuss uncivil language and its correlation with violence against police officers.
• Margaret Jane Radin, the Henry King Radin Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, will discuss strategies of rhetorical capture and how it is used in numerous contexts.
• Kenji Yoshino, the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU Law School, will examine public and legal discourse relating to same-sex marriage using a "law and literature approach" to assess what is gained and lost in discourse by the inherent civility required by the court. 

"Many people and several organizations have contributed to this project, most notably Polsinelli Shughart," Danneman said.

"In recent years, Arizona has been in the center of the increasingly polarized national political discourse," she added. "We chose to organize this conference to foster legal thinking about the significance of this discourse on society."