Posted by Orin Kerr:
The Purpose of the AALS January Meeting:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_12_23-2007_12_29.shtml#1198813407
Over at [1]Brian Leiter's Law School Reports, Brian comments on the
upcoming [2]Association of American Law Schools January meeting for
law professors: "[M]y sense is that specialist meetings of scholars
have completely displaced the AALS as the destination of choice for
those looking for conferences with intellectual content. Am I wrong?"
Brian is quite right; most AALS panels are very disappointing. As I
understand it, the outgoing chair of each AALS section gets total
discretion to pick a topic and to select panelists. Too often, this
translates into the topic being whatever the outgoing chair wants to
hear and the panelists being the friends of the chair. Not exactly a
recipe for intellectual content.
Of course, that doesn't mean the AALS January meeting has no purpose
at all. As I see it, it serves at least five critical purposes, in
descending order of importance: (1) It provides law professors with an
all-expenses paid trip to the city where the conference is being held
(this year, New York); (2) It provides professors an opportunity to
sample the culinary delights of that city ([3]figures Solove would be
way ahead of me there); (3) For conservatives and libertarians, it
provides a trip to the [4]Federalist Society's shadow conference,
always held near the AALS meeting and generally rich in intellectual
content; (4) For blog readers, it puts you in town for [5]the annual
CoOp/Prawfs happy hour; and (5) It provides a chance to roll your eyes
at the bland and meaningless theme the conference organizers come up
with, this year being "[6]Reassessing Our Roles as Scholars and
Educators in Light of Change." Uh huh.
(With that said, yup, I'll be there this year. In fact, I plan to
walk up to people so I can ask, "so, are you reassessing your role as
scholars and educators in light of change?" I sure hope they are!)
References
1. http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2007/12/the-hopeless-as.html
2. http://www.aals.org/am2008/
3. http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2007/12/aals_foodie_tra.html
4. http://www.fed-soc.org/events/id.491/default.asp
5. http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2007/12/reminder_concur.html
6. http://www.aals.org/am2008/
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