Each year The Roundtable sponsors symposia on topics in which law and some other academic or social interest intersect. "The Wages of Stardom: Law and the Winner-Take-All Society" is our first symposium of 1999, and it focused on how the "Winner-Take-All" phenomenon affects lawyer salaries and faculty hiring and how both relate to the overall legal profession, legal representation, income inequality, and other issues.

The "superstar" or "winner-take-all" phenomenon is the idea that, under certain market conditions, a small increase in talent can result in a disproportionately large economic benefit to the "winner," presenting problems to both economic efficiency and social equality. On Friday, February 26, 1999, The Roundtable invited four renowned scholars to debate whether, and to what degree, the superstar/winner-take-all phenomenon exists and affects the legal community. Cass R. Sunstein, the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School, acted as our moderator. Professor Sunstein is widely regarded as one of the nation’s foremost legal scholars in the fields of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law and how laws influence human behavior and vice versa. A few of his recent books include After the Rights Revolution: Reconceiving the Regulatory State and Free Markets and Social Justice. Robert H. Frank is a professor of economics at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University and is Goldwin Smith Professor of Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences. Professor Frank, more than anyone, has brought the debate about the "winner-take-all" phenomenon to the public eye, particularly with the 1995 book he co-authored with Philip Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society. His most recent book is the widely acclaimed Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess. Sherwin Rosen is the Edwin and Betty Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is considered one of the world’s foremost experts in the fields of labor economics, applied microeconomics and income distribution. In 1981, Professor Rosen started the academic debate on our topic with his article "The Economics of Superstars" in The American Economic Review. Kevin M. Murphy is the George Pratt Shultz Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. In 1997, The American Economic Association awarded Professor Murphy the John Bates Clark Medal, a prize given every two years to the best American economist under the age of forty. He is widely recognized as one of the top economists in the world for his work on the causes and consequences of income inequality, unemployment and economic growth, and his research on labor, minimum wages, human capital and education are considered ground-breaking.

Both Robert Frank and Cass Sunstein argued that the Superstar/Winner-Take-All phenomenon is real and poses serious problems for society—problems that perhaps government intervention can solve. Sherwin Rosen and Kevin Murphy were more skeptical about this problem and argued that the free market can take care of any such distortions.

A transcript of the discussion appears in Volume 6 of the Roundtable.