Foreword: The Ohio Constitution on the Occasion of Its Bicentennial

This symposium issue of the Cleveland State Law Review publishes the papers that were presented at a conference marking the bicentennial of the Ohio Constitution. That conference, held here at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in April 2003, examined the history and assessed the vitality of our state constitution. The conference was conceived and its planning was supervised by our Dean, Steven H. Steinglass, who has devoted significant scholarly attention to the Ohio Constitution. In light of my own endeavors in state constitutional law, both as a lawyer and as a scholar, I gladly assisted Dean Steinglass in organizing the conference. In the paragraphs that follow, I briefly summarize each of the contributions to this symposium. Those papers cover a broad range of topics — from Ohio constitutional history and interpretation to race and equal protection, education and tort reform, separation of powers and the one-subject rule.