As Pennsylvania, New York and a few other states fight to sustain effective state governance, law experts have converged at the Penn State Dickinson School of Law to consider the capitals’ underlying problems.
State Constitutionalism in the 21st Century, a symposium at University Park, ran through 5 p.m. Wednesday at the Lewis Katz Building. A live webcast was available through the Dickinson website — at no charge to viewers.
The idea was for law academics and other experts to examine ‘some pretty intractable problems in (state lawmakers’) getting along and working together,’ from Harrisburg to Albany, N.Y., and Austin, Texas, said Dickinson Professor Jamison Colburn.
Some scholars believe that some state constitutions, in their current structures, ‘invite gridlock and disagreement and unsustainable practices within state government,’ Colburn said. Pennsylvania, for example, went eight years in the last decade without passing a state budget on time.
About 200 people registered to participate in the symposium, where they considered underlying causes of state-capital dysfunction and ways to fix it. Attendees arrived from as far away as California and Oregon, Colburn said.
They include Jack L. Landau, justice-elect at the Oregon Supreme Court, and Robert F. Williams, distinguished professor of law and associate director of the Center for State Constitutional Studies at Rutgers School of Law-Camden.
Materials presented at the symposium, sponsored by Dickinson, were collected and will be published in the spring 2011 issue of the Penn State Law Review, Colburn said. He said the group’s goal is to guide constitutional conversations as they move forward on the state level.
Locally, state Rep. Scott Conklin, D-Rush Township, has already called for a constitutional convention in Pennsylvania. Such a convention would examine the overall operation of the state government and how best to reform it through a revision of the state constitution. That last happened in 1968.
Conklin has said that a constitutional convention should include a careful examination of the redistricting process — that is, how the state establishes the boundaries of lawmakers’ districts. Any revisions to the constitution would face a popular vote at the ballot box, he has said.
His opponent in the Nov. 2 general election, Republican Joyce Haas, has a different take. She has said that Pennsylvania already has a solid constitution; it just needs to be enforced, she has said.
Haas has said that necessary reforms can be achieved largely through internal changes in Harrisburg, such as new limits on the duration of chairmanships and other leadership roles in the Legislature.
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