Archive for the ‘Conferences’ Category

The Intersection of Privacy and Security: Data Privacy Day Event at GW Law School

posted by Daniel Solove

The National Cyber Security Alliance Presents:

Data Privacy Day 2012

The Intersection of Privacy & Security

Featuring: The Honorable Julie Brill
Commissioner, Federal Trade Commission

 Event Sponsored by:

 

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The convergence of privacy and security: how do we overcome the conflict that seems to be inherent between the two? Is it a philosophical impossibility or an aspiration to be achieved?

Data security, according to common definition is the “confidentiality, integrity and availability” of data. It is the practice of ensuring that the data being stored is safe from unauthorized access and use, ensuring that the data is reliable and accurate and that is available for use when it is needed. Privacy on the other hand, is the appropriate use of data.

Our panel will consider the implications of how privacy and security are two sides of the same coin and what companies can and should do to ensure privacy and security are protected while allowing innovation to flourish.

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Agenda

9:00 Registration
9:30 Welcome

• Michael Kaiser
  Executive Director, National Cyber Security Alliance
• Dan Solove
  John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law, The George Washington University School of Law
• Paul Schiff Berman
  Dean and Robert Kramer Research Professor of Law, The George Washington University School of Law

9:40 Keynote

The Honorable Julie Brill
Commissioner, Federal Trade Commission

10:10 Panel Discussion

Reflections & Aspirations: The Past, The Present & The Future

Moderator
Christopher Wolf
Founder & Co-Chair, Future of Privacy Forum and Partner, Hogan Lovells US LLP

Panelists

• David Hoffman
  Director of Security Policy and Global Privacy Officer, Intel
• Gerard Lewis
  Vice President, Deputy General Counsel & Chief Privacy Officer, Comcast Cable
• Ari Schwartz
  Senior Internet Policy Advisor, Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Commerce

10:50 Panel Discussion

Privacy & Security: Best Practices in Action

Moderator
Christopher Wolf
Co-Chair & Founder, Future of Privacy Forum and Partner, Hogan Lovells US LLP

Panelists

• Rick Buck
  Head of Privacy GSI, eBay
• Erin Egan
  Chief Privacy Officer, Policy, Facebook
• JoAnn C. Stonier
  Global Privacy & Data Protection Officer, MasterCard Worldwide
• Bob Quinn
  Senior Vice President-Federal Regulatory & Chief Privacy Officer, AT&T

 

 

 

 

 

  January 22, 2012 at 1:51 pm   Posted in: Conferences, Privacy   Print This Post   No Comments

FTC Facial Recognition Event

posted by Daniel Solove

Today, I’ll be speaking at Face Facts: A Forum on Facial Recognition Technology, an event organized by the FTC.

Here’s the agenda.

The event will be webcast here.

 

  December 8, 2011 at 1:44 am   Posted in: Conferences, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (National Security)   Print This Post   No Comments

Personal Information: The Benefits and Risks of De-Identification

posted by Daniel Solove

On Monday, December 5th, I’ll be speaking at a Future of Privacy Forum conference entitled “Personal Information: The Benefits and Risks of De-Identification.”

I will be speaking about my forthcoming paper,The PII Problem: Privacy and a New Concept of Personally Identifiable Information, 86 New York University Law Review (forthcomng 2011) (with Paul M. Schwartz).  The paper should hopefully be out in print any day now.

The conference schedule and participants are great, and I think this should be a terrific event.  More information is here.

Below the fold is the schedule.

Read the rest of this post »

  December 4, 2011 at 9:02 pm   Posted in: Conferences, Privacy   Print This Post   No Comments

Conference Announcement: Rights Working Group

posted by Frank Pasquale

The conference “Securing Our Rights in the Information-Sharing Era” will be held in San Francisco early next month. From the announcement:

This year marks not only the 10 year anniversary of 9/11, but also 15 years since the passage of the “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996″ (IIRAIRA), the bill that established the 287(g) program which later set the stage for Secure Communities program . . . . The government has . . . invest[ed] in enforcement strategies that violate our civil liberties and human rights. As the government has expanded these tactics, it has also invested resources to build a massive, complicated information sharing system where law enforcement agencies are given new powers. Law enforcement can now search through emails, listen to phone calls, track purchases and collect files on people who may or may not be suspected of any crimes. Local law enforcement is enforcing federal immigration laws, engaging in racial profiling and funneling migrants into detention and deportation. These enforcement tactics employed across the country and at the borders in the name of national security and immigration enforcement are affecting the rights of everyone in the United States.

For those interested in an academic treatment of information-sharing, Citron and I wrote this piece last year.

  November 16, 2011 at 10:55 am   Posted in: Civil Rights, Conferences   Print This Post   One Comment

CELS VI: Half a CELS is Statistically Better Than No CELS

posted by Dave Hoffman

As promised, I’m filing a report from the Sixth Annual Empirical Studies Conference, held 11/4-11/5 at Northwestern Law School.  Several of the attendees at the Conference approached me and remarked on my posts from CELS V, IV, and III. That added pressure, coupled with missing half of the conference due to an unavoidable conflict, has delayed this post substantially.  Apologies!  Next time, I promise to attend from the opening ceremonies until they burn the natural law figure in effigy.  Next year’s conference is at Stanford.  I’ll make a similar offer to the one I’ve made in the past: if the organizing committee pays my way, I promise not only to blog the whole thing, but to praise you unstintingly.  Here’s an example: I didn’t observe a single technical or organization snafu at Northwestern this year.  Kudos to the organizing committee: Bernie Black, Shari Diamond, and Emerson Tiller.

What I saw

I arrived Friday night in time for the poster session.  A few impressions.  Yun-chien Chang’s Tenancy in ‘Anticommons’? A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Co-Ownership won “best poster,” but I was drawn to David Lovis-McMahon & N.J. Schweitzer’s Substantive Justice: How the Substantive Law Shapes Perceived Fairness.  Overall, the trend toward professionalization in poster display continues unabated.  Even Ted Eisenberg’s poster was glossy & evidenced some post-production work — Ted’s posters at past sessions were, famously, not as civilized. Gone are the days where you could throw some powerpoint slides onto a board and talk about them over a glass of wine!  That said, I’m skeptical about poster sessions generally.  I would love to hear differently from folks who were there.

On Saturday, bright eyed and caffeinated, I went to a Juries panel, where I got to see three pretty cool papers.  The first, by Mercer/Kadous, was about how juries are likely to react to precise/imprecise legal standards.  (For a previous version, see here.) Though the work was nominally about auditing standards, it seemed generalizable to other kinds of legal rules.  The basic conclusion was that imprecise standards increase the likelihood of plaintiff verdicts, but only when the underlying conduct is conservative but deviates from industry norms.  By contrast, if the underlying conduct is aggressive, jurors return fewer pro-plaintiff verdicts.  Unlike most such projects, the authors permitted a large number of mock juries to deliberate, which added a degree of external validity.  Similarly worth reading was Lee/Waters’ work on jury verdict reporters (bottom line: reporters aren’t systematically pro-plaintiff, as the CW suggests, but they are awfully noise measures of what juries are actually doing).  Finally, Hans/Reyna presented some very interesting work on the “gist” model of jury decisionmaking.

At 11:00, I had to skip a great paper by Daniel Klerman whose title was worth the price of admission alone – the Selection of Thirteenth-Century Disputes for Litigation.  Instead, I went to Law and Psychology III.  There, Kenworthey Bilz presented Crime, Tort, Anger, and Insult, a paper which studies how attribution & perceptions of dignitary loss mark a psychological boundary between crime and tort cases.  Bilz presented several neat experiments in service of her thesis, among them a priming survey- – people primed to think about crimes complete the word “ins-” as “insult,” while people primed to think about torts complete it as “insurance.”  (I think I’ve got that right – - the paper isn’t available online, and I’m drawing on two week old memories.)

At noon, Andrew Gelman gave a fantastic presentation on the visualization of empirical data.  The bottom line: wordles are silly and convey no important information.  Actually, Andrew didn’t say that.  I just thought that coming in.  What Andrew said was something more like “can’t people who produce visually interesting graphs and people who produce graphs that convey information get along?”

Finally, I was the discussant at an Experimental Panel, responding to Brooks/Stremitzer/Tontrup’s Framing Contracts:Why Loss Framing Increases Effort.  Attendees witnessed my ill-fated attempt to reverse the order of my presentation on the fly, leading me to neglect the bread in the praise sandwich.  This was a good teaching moment about academic norms. My substantive reaction to Framing Contracts is that it was hard to know how much the paper connected to real-world contracting behavior, since the kinds of decision tasks that the experimental subjects were asked to perform were stripped of the relational & reciprocal norms that characterize actual deals.

CELS: What I missed

The entire first day!  One of my papers with the cultural cognition project, They Saw a Protest, apparently came off well.  Of course, there was also tons of great stuff not written from within the expanding cultural cognition empire.  Here’s a selection: on lawyer optimism; on public housing, enforcement and race; on probable cause and hindsight judging; and several papers on Iqbal, none of which appear to be online.

What did you see & like?

  November 15, 2011 at 3:26 pm   Posted in: Advertising, Behavioral Law and Economics, Conferences, Empirical Analysis of Law   Print This Post   No Comments

CELS VI

posted by Dave Hoffman

I’m off to CELS VI in Chicago tomorrow.  As with previous years, I’ll try to provide a recap post after the conference. Unfortunately, due to work obligations, I’m missing the entire first day.  So if you happen to be at the conference and see a nice presentation or interesting paper that deserves highlighting, please do so in the comment thread.

  November 3, 2011 at 11:05 pm   Posted in: Conferences   Print This Post   No Comments

Aging Conference at Temple

posted by Dave Hoffman

On behalf of my colleague Nancy Knauer, I’m happy to announce that Temple Law School will host a one day symposium titled Aging in the US:  The Next Civil Rights Movement? In this Symposium, participants will explore elder law and aging policy from a civil rights perspective and begin the important task of rethinking equality across the lifespan.  Over twenty leading scholars and advocates will engage cutting edge public policy issues regarding health care, guardianships, caregiving, institutionalized elders, and the special needs of minority populations. Featured speakers include Nina Kohn from Syracuse Law School and 2011 MacArthur Fellow M.T. Connolly of Lifelong Justice, among many others.  The goal of the Symposium is to move the national conversation surrounding aging beyond the traditional elder law topics of estate planning, benefit eligibility, and health care financing and ask whether elder rights should be the next civil rights movement.  Papers will be published in a special issue of the Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review.

Information regarding the conference and registration is available at www.law.temple.edu/aging.

  September 28, 2011 at 9:41 pm   Posted in: Conferences   Print This Post   No Comments

National Association of Women Judges Conference

posted by Frank Pasquale

I just wanted to make this announcement about an extraordinary conference:

The National Association of Women Judges is hosting their annual international conference in Newark, New Jersey on October 12-16. On October 14th, there will be a symposium at Rutgers Law School entitled Promoting Global Equality for Women Through the Law and on the 15th Seton Hall Law School will host break-out sessions on various topics including domestic violence, urban revitalization, immigration, forensic evidence, cross-cultural issues in the courts and leadership training. Seton Hall Law student Megan Altman will be receiving the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg scholarship which will be presented at the NAWJ Gala Saturday night at the Newark Club with Justice Ginsburg delivering the keynote address.

More information here at the NAWJ website. According to an email I received, “There are more than 50 international judges registered for the conference from countries including Argentina, Canada, China, Gambia, Guam, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jordan, Korea, Lagos, Malawi, Moldova, Navajo Nation, Nepal, Philippines, Sarajevo, South Korea, Taiwan, Tanzania, and Uganda.”

  September 10, 2011 at 2:53 pm   Posted in: Conferences, Feminism and Gender   Print This Post   No Comments

Call for Papers: Dodd-Frank

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Call for Papers:

Financial Institutions and Consumer Financial Services Section

AALS Annual Meeting – January 2012

Rubber Hits Road: Implementing Dodd-Frank amid Reform Fatigue

This program will take place one and a half years after the Dodd-Frank Act was signed into law. The law left many of the details of financial reform to be filled in by regulators, raising the risk of capture. Some of the most important rule makings have begun in earnest; others have stalled as reform fatigue sets in. Meanwhile, reform efforts in Europe and international regulatory initiatives remain works-in-progress.

What lessons can we draw from the implementation of Dodd-Frank so far? What have been the greatest achievements and the greatest disappointments as the legislative process has given way to the administrative? What devils have lain hidden in the details of the Federal Register? What aspects of reform have been largely forgotten? What does the path of financial reform say about legislative and regulatory process? What lessons can be drawn from the reform efforts in Europe and elsewhere? Does the focus on regulating institutions detract from a focus on regulating financial instruments, markets or economic functions and risks?

More ominously, is the crisis truly over? Are we at grave risk of fighting the last war? Has reform missed the mark altogether? This meeting is part of a project to engage the legal academy in sustained theoretical and policy contributions to financial regulation. It also presents an opportunity to look at specific rulemakings in detail, as well as to address larger questions about the course of reform after laws are made.

Call for papers:

Law teachers and other scholars are invited to submit manuscripts or abstracts dealing with any aspect of the foregoing topics. Junior faculty members are particularly encouraged to submit manuscripts or abstracts. A review committee consisting of Section officers will select one or more papers or proposals and will invite the author(s) of each selected submission to present their work at the program session in Washington, D.C. in January 2012.

Abstracts should be comprehensive enough to allow the review committee to meaningfully evaluate the aims and likely content of papers they propose. Please send manuscripts or abstracts to the Program Chair (Erik Gerding, University of Colorado) at profgerding@gmail.com no later than August 30, 2010. Please place the name and contact information of authors only on the cover page of submissions.

Please forward this Call for Papers to anyone who might be interested.

  June 15, 2011 at 7:54 am   Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Conferences, Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Current Events, Securities, Securities Regulation   Print This Post   No Comments

Announcing the Loyola Second Annual Constitutional Law Colloquium

posted by Sarah Waldeck

Just a quick note that the Loyola University Chicago School of Law has scheduled its Second Annual Constitutional Law Colloquium for October 21 & 22, 2011.  The conference is being organized by Professors John E. Nowak, Juan Perea, Alexander Tsesis and Michael Zimmer.  

 The goal of the conference is to allow professors to develop new ideas with the help of supportive colleagues on a wide range of constitutional law topics.  To this end, the conference is aimed at bringing together constitutional law scholars at all stages of their professional development to discuss current projects, doctrinal developments in constitutional law, and future goals.  The organizers are hoping to be able to schedule presentations for all who submit and will group participants by subject matter.   

Professors who are interested in participating should submit an abstract of  150 to 200 words by May 31, 2011.  

Topics, abstracts, papers, questions, and comments should be submitted to:

 Program Administrator Carrie Bird, cbird@luc.edu

Participants are expected to pay their own travel expenses. Loyola will provide facilities, support, and continental breakfasts on Friday and Saturday, lunch on Friday and Saturday, and a dinner on Friday night.

  April 25, 2011 at 4:04 pm   Posted in: Conferences, Constitutional Law   Print This Post   No Comments

ClassCrits Conference Call for Papers

posted by Frank Pasquale

The ClassCrits blog has a number of interesting posts up recently. The group has announced a call for papers for a September conference; here is the notice:

ClassCrits IV, “Criminalizing Economic Inequality”

This workshop, the fourth meeting of ClassCrits, takes as its theme the criminalization of economic inequality. The dominance of “free market” economic theory and policy has been accompanied in the U.S. by increasing reliance on the criminal justice system to make and enforce economic policy. The criminal justice system is increasingly used to control persons and groups whose participation in formal markets is marginal at best. Many aspects of traditional immigration law have morphed into “crimmigration”, appropriating domestic criminal law enforcement tools and redefining whole communities of workers and their families as “illegal people.” States and municipalities have criminalized the lives of homeless people, including those who are mentally ill.

Read the rest of this post »

  April 15, 2011 at 1:13 pm   Posted in: Civil Rights, Conferences, Current Events, Financial Institutions   Print This Post   3 Comments

YLJ Online Symposium: A Republic of Statutes

posted by Yale Law Journal

  March 31, 2011 at 1:25 pm   Posted in: Conferences, Government Secrecy, Health Law, Immigration, Law Rev (Yale)   Print This Post   No Comments

Gender Justice and Indian Sovereignty

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

It is my pleasure to invite you to Thomas Jefferson School of Law’s upcoming 10th Anniversary Women and the Law Conference, “Gender Justice and Indian Sovereignty: Native American Women and the Law,” on Friday, February 18, 2011.

This one-day conference will be held at TJSL’s brand-new state-of-the-art building in downtown San Diego, and will feature the annual Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lecture (founded in 2003 with generous support from Justice Ginsburg), by our Keynote Speaker, Interim Associate Dean Stacy Leeds, University of Kansas School of Law, former Justice of the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court and currently chief judge of three Indian Nation tribal courts. Her Lecture will be titled: “Resistance, Resilience, and Reconciliation: Reflections on Native American Women and the Law.” Read the rest of this post »

  January 30, 2011 at 3:31 pm   Posted in: Civil Rights, Conferences, Feminism and Gender, Indian Law, Race   Print This Post   No Comments

What If? Symposium

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I’m pleased to announce that the Indiana Law Review will hold its 2011 Symposium on “What If?  Counterfactuals in Constitutional History.”  The following are expected to attend this conference on April 1 (an appropriate day for a counterfactual event):

David Fontana, George Washington Law School

Heidi Kitrosser, Minnesota Law School

Alison LaCroix, University of Chicago Law School

Carlton Larson, UC Davis Law School

Kim Roosevelt, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Ilya Somin, George Mason Law School

Amanda Tyler, George Washington Law School

If you’re interested in attending, please contact Amanda Mulroony at amanbake@iupui.edu

  January 19, 2011 at 8:29 am   Posted in: Conferences, Uncategorized   Print This Post   One Comment

Stalking About Your Generation

posted by Jonathan Lipson

Yesterday, I had the all-too-brief pleasure of sitting in on the first couple of talks at the Wisconsin Law Review’s Symposium, Intergenerational Equity and Intellectual Property, here in Madison.

Organized by my colleague, Shubha Ghosh (and starring, among others, CoOp-erator Deven Desai), the goal is important:  How do we understand the intergenerational consequences of a legal regime—intellectual property—that is strongly determined by the present, but which has significant, but under-theorized, consequences for the future?  Fights about extending the term of the Mickey Mouse copyright—or any set of long-haul rights—don’t just affect my kids, but potentially their kids, their kids’ kids, and so on.  These are, in short, really fights about intergenerational equity.

I was only able to hear Michigan’s Peggy Radin (Property Longa, Vita Brevis) and Penn’s Matt Adler (Intergenerational Equity: Puzzles for Welfarists), but as expected, both provided awesome overviews of these sorts of problems.  As Radin pointed out, intellectual property (knowledge and information law generally) always involves two types of generational problems: One is temporal (my parents, me, my kids, their kids, etc.); the other is technological (my students barely know from videotape; I will never beat my daughter at any computer game).

Adler explained that it is easy (and perhaps imprudent) to dismiss the utility of welfare economics as a tool to make these sorts of decisions.  Certainly, we might say, Benthamite sums of utils could predict little for those not in existence (the future):  what would their utility function be, really?

Yet, he observed, robust and subtle analytic models and conceptual frameworks are being developed by the Sens and Arrows of the world, and they may (if the future is bright) help develop more equitable and effective decision tools for matters with a long temporal reach.

Those who follow state politics may find this all a bit ironic. Wisconsin’s recent election was a decisive victory for Republicans, who captured both houses of the legislature and the Governor’s office on a message which may strain the state’s motto, “Forward.”

If Republicans keep their word, tax breaks for the rich and elderly will replace education and healthcare spending for the young and unborn; fossil fuel (old tech) subsidies will replace biofuel (new tech) development; and the University may have to fight to continue its path-breaking stem-cell research, certainly a way to kill both jobs in the present and medical miracles in the future. This may be good for baby boomers, but isn’t likely so hot for their grandkids.

Wisconsin’s liberals are, of course, despondent over their loss of power and position.  Yet, forecasting and discounting long-term causation are among the things that make questions of intergenerational equity  so interesting and difficult.  I doubt Newt Gingrich thought in 1994 that the Contract with America would virtually assure Bill Clinton a second term, but today the former seems to have led to the latter.   Likewise, it is certain that neither Jeremy Bentham nor Pete Townshend could have predicted the duration of their memetic contributions to today’s discussions about tomorrow.  They probably just thought it was all rock and roll.

  November 13, 2010 at 6:33 pm  Tags: Intellectual Property, intergenerational equity, Republicans, Wisconsin  Posted in: Conferences, Economic Analysis of Law, Intellectual Property, Jurisprudence, Law Rev (Wisconsin)   Print This Post   No Comments

CELS V: The Year of the Experiment

posted by Dave Hoffman

For the last several years, I’ve posted recaps of the Annual Empirical Studies Conference.  (See me, @ Cornell, @ USC).  This year, as promised, will be no different.  Yale hosted CELS V, and the committee did a bang up job: the food was tasty; there were no technical snafus of note; and the panels appeared to have a high degree of internal validity & congruence. Richard Brooks, Alan Gerber, Dan Kahan, Yair Listokin, Tracey Meares, and (especially) Roberta Romano are all due a round of applause, or, better yet, supersized computer monitors so they can see their data better.  In this post, I’m going to provide a running diary of the conference.  It will be like you were there with me, except you don’t have to suffer through my bouts of social anxiety!

Unfortunately, I missed the hottest ticket of the conference, Bruce Ackerman’s commentary on Law/Versteeg’s The Evolution and Ideology of Global Constitutionalism.  From all reports, Ackerman said something like: “wrong questions, wrong data, wrong theory,” and then imploded in frustration.  Instead of watching those fireworks, I was watching Yair Listokin present The Meaning of Contractual Silence: A Field Experiment [Here’s an older version of the paper].  Listokin ran a field experiment selling ipods on ebay, some with a warranty, some as-is, and some silent on the warranty term. He found that individuals paid attention to the contract, and there was some evidence that the UCC default was about what they thought silence meant.  As he admitted, there were problems with the design of the study – particularly, (1) small & skewed samples; and (2) a lack of clarity about how much buyers know about ebay’s unique and self-contained dispute resolution system.  As someone remarked after the presentation, it would have been interesting had Listokin sold all the customers bad ipods (instead of good ones) and studied how the contract terms influenced behavior post-“breach”.  Then again, who needs that IRB hassle?

Read the rest of this post »

  November 7, 2010 at 1:20 pm   Posted in: Bankruptcy, Behavioral Law and Economics, Conferences, Contract Law & Beyond, Economic Analysis of Law, Empirical Analysis of Law   Print This Post   4 Comments

What Would a Policymaker That Cares About Business Do Now?

posted by Dave Hoffman

Over at the Conglomerate, a set of blogging scholars are mulling the question of “what should be the business law agenda for the new Congress and the President for the next two years?”  My answer, in a word: nothing.  Go and check out all the posts.

I’m at CELS in New Haven for the next two  days and will report on the papers when I rheturn.

  November 5, 2010 at 10:09 pm   Posted in: Conferences   Print This Post   No Comments

Questioning the Value of Omnibus Academic Conferences

posted by Alan Chen

As part of my current job, I try to track and distribute information about conferences and workshops that will interest my colleagues and provide good opportunities for them to obtain critical feedback on their scholarly work, as well as make connections with other scholars in their fields. Perhaps because I pay more attention to all types of conferences now (or perhaps because there truly are more of them), I sense a proliferation of smaller legal scholarship workshops focusing on particular subject matters or disciplines, bringing together scholars from schools in a specific region, or fostering development of junior faculty (of course, there are also combinations of these). Much of the anecdotal feedback I get from my colleagues suggests that these smaller workshops are extraordinarily helpful to participants because of the type and depth of feedback they get on their papers. The size of these gatherings also allows for richer opportunities to engage in informal discussions with colleagues and learn about each other’s work.

All of this brings me to the larger question I want to pose. What is the purpose of the annual January AALS meeting? Don’t get me wrong. I love New Orleans and San Francisco and catching up with friends and colleagues from other schools as much as anyone. But at this point, the conference itself seems like a bit of a dinosaur. If the principal justification for the meeting is intellectual enrichment, it’s pretty inefficient. Hundreds of papers are presented, the vast majority of them beyond any single professor’s areas of interest or expertise. And personally, with some important exceptions, I often have been disappointed with the papers presented at the annual meeting compared to the papers I have heard at specialized conferences (including specialized AALS conferences). One could make the case for the general meeting as an opportunity to hear work in fields beyond our specialty areas, but how many of us actually attend panels in fields completely unrelated to our work? I’m sure some administrative work gets done at AALS, but probably nothing that couldn’t be accomplished by a conference call.

Some academic disciplines combine their annual meetings with their hiring conferences. For example, the Modern Language Association has a long tradition of facilitating faculty job interviews at its annual meeting. That approach makes a little more sense because faculties from most schools are gathered in one place to interview candidates, anyway. But the AALS separated out its Faculty Recruitment Conference from the general meeting many years ago, so that rationale has disappeared.

I approach my thinking about the AALS meeting from a resources standpoint as well. At this time of year (as the early bird registration deadline approaches), I receive lots of faculty requests for funding to attend the meeting. Our school spends a disproportionate percentage of its travel budget sending faculty to AALS. In tight fiscal times, it seems useful to contemplate whether that is a good use of funds, or whether that money would be better spent sending faculty to the smaller specialty or regional conferences discussed above. Or, might we decide after considering the heretical idea of scrapping the annual meeting that the AALS’s winter fest is just too big to fail?

  November 4, 2010 at 4:32 pm  Tags: AALS, academia, Academic Conferences  Posted in: Conferences, Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   6 Comments

Symposium on National Security Policy and the Role of Lawyering

posted by Sarah Waldeck

On Thursday, October 28, the Seton Hall Law Review is hosting a day-long symposium in Newark, New Jersey entitled National Security Policy and the Role of Lawyering: Guantanamo and Beyond.  Here’s the description:

The broad focus of the Symposium will be to discuss preventive detention and the future of United States national security policy.  As the United States prepares for the closing of Guantánamo Bay detention center, the country still faces the challenge of balancing national security and individual rights.  Controversy continues to plague U.S.-run prisons abroad, such as Bagram in Afghanistan; at the same time, the country has yet to resolve critical questions surrounding the scope of executive detention authority in the “war on terrorism,” leaving the future of U.S. detention policy uncertain.  We hope to discuss the mark Guantánamo has left on the United States and explore the future of preventive detention from the standpoint of lawyers, scholars, policymakers, the media, and former detainees. 

Panelists will include Peter Finn of the Washington Post,  Dafna Linzer from ProPublica, Steve Vladeck from American University and Joe Margulies from Northwestern.   You can find the full symposium schedule and a list of panelists here.

  October 16, 2010 at 1:58 pm   Posted in: Conferences   Print This Post   No Comments

GW’s Junior Scholar Workshop and Prizes

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

As anticipated, the Center for Law, Economics and Finance at George Washington University Law School (C-LEAF)  has formally announced its first annual Junior Faculty Business and Financial Law Workshop and Junior Faculty Scholarship Prizes.    The Inaugural Workshop will be held and Prizes awarded on April 1-2, 2011, at GW Law School in Washington, DC.

Up to ten papers will be chosen from those submitted for presentation at the Workshop. At the Workshop, one or more senior scholars will comment on each paper, followed by general discussion of each paper among all participants. The Workshop audience will include invited junior scholars, faculty from GW’s Law School and Business School, faculty from other institutions, and invited guests.

At the conclusion of the Workshop, up to three papers will be awarded Junior Faculty Scholarship Prizes, of $3,000, $2,000, and $1,000, respectively. Chosen papers will be featured on C-LEAF’s website as part of its Working Paper Series. In addition to participating in the Workshop, all scholars selected to present at the  Workshop will be invited to become Fellows of C-LEAF. Read the rest of this post »

  June 8, 2010 at 1:00 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Articles and Books, Conferences, Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Securities, Securities Regulation, Tax   Print This Post   One Comment

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