I edited my first issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics twenty-one years ago. The issue was a collection of unrelated articles that had been submitted to the journal, a publishing format that almost every academic journal used then and one that continues to be exceedingly popular today. However, with my very next issue, I began the publishing program that I was hired to implement: the idea that each issue of JLME would feature a self-contained “symposium,” a collection of papers exploring a single topic from a variety of different perspectives and backgrounds. I could not have implemented this change without the support of Kathleen Boozang, my first Editor-in-Chief at JLME, and my friend, ASLME’s Executive Director at the time, Benjamin Moulton. We waited anxiously to see if this project we all quietly called the “symposium system” would work. Could we sustain it for a year? For two?
It turns out we could sustain it for twenty-one years. This issue that you now hold in your hands is the first in more than two decades that doesn’t contain a symposium. Due to some COVID-related changing of plans, this issue instead contains an exciting collection of unrelated papers exploring many different and interesting topics, much like my very first issue. It also contains, thanks largely to our current Editor-in-Chief Aaron Kesselheim, many commentary papers exploring the submitted papers in greater detail. With the lack of a unifying topic, this issue features a huge variety of interesting material, including papers on organ donation, medical billing, harm reduction, vaccine policy, criminal diversion programs, secondary use of clinical data, COVID treatments, and environmental racism. When you include our always-interesting columns, we think you will be proud of the breadth and scope of this very atypical issue of JLME. Of course, with our next issue we will be returning to our “symposium format” for the foreseeable future, and as always, we encourage all of you to submit your proposals for symposiums and your unsolicited independent articles to us. We are always happy to see them, as we know that our great success as a journal is due wholly to the dedication, skill, and enthusiasms of our authors, editors, members, and readers. Thank you for your support of JLME.
