Best Practices of Structuring a Faculty Workshop (that includes students!)

Over at TaxProf, Paul Caron has posted an immensely thoughtful commentary by Neil Buchanan (George Washington Law) on how to structure a faculty tax policy workshop that includes students.  Having participated in empirical studies workshop at Illinois that followed a similar format,  I want to strenuously endorse Neil's comments and assert that his insights need not be limited to tax policy.  Neil writes:

[O]ne of the great values of holding tax policy workshops in law schools is that we embrace an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship. Bringing together scholars, convenors, and commentators with different scholarly backgrounds (within law as well as in related fields) is our greatest strength. We do ourselves and our students [emphasis added] a great favor by being mindful not to allow our discussions to be dominated by the methodologies or assumptions of any single field of study. It is very heartening to see the interdisciplinary approach to tax policy [my edit] scholarship flowering across the country. I hope that the trend of encouraging this through tax policy workshops [involving students] at more and more law schools continues.

My efforts to organize a mini-subfield conference within a conference at Law & Society each year are based on a similar model perfected by Neil Buchanan.   In my book, he is a real thought leader.