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Boston College co-hosted a conference last week in honor of the late James Q. Wilson, a highly respected scholar and writer who was the first Senior Fellow at the University’s Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. Wilson died last year at the age of 80.
“Thinking About Politics: A Conference Dedicated to Explaining and Perpetuating the Political Insights of James Q. Wilson” began April 4 with an afternoon panel discussion at Harvard University, followed by a full day of panels on April 5 in the Heights Room of Corcoran Commons.
Panel topics included “Parties and Organized Interests,” “Crime and Policing,” “Bureaucracy and Regulation,” “From Political Science to Policy Analysis” and “Character and Culture.”
Boston College speakers and discussants were O’Neill Professor of American Politics R. Shep Melnick, Professor of Political Science Marc Landy, and Martha Bayles, a faculty member in the College of Arts and Sciences Honors Program. Other distinguished participants included William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard; Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert A. Katzmann; David R. Mayhew, researcher on party politics and American government; and Lawrence Mead, whose work is viewed as instrumental to the American welfare reforms of the 1990s.
For more on the conference, see jqwilson.org/multimedia/thinking-about-politics.