After an early morning flight back to Miami and a 500 mile drive up to funky T-town yesterday, I’ve just finished my first day of teaching back at FSU after a flurry of fun in DC during AALS week. Rick parachuted in for a day of presentations and thus had to miss the Happy Hour, but it was great to see Orly, Steve, and Matt at the bloggerfest on Wednesday night, along with many of our current guests, alums, and readers. All told, I think we had well over 130 people at Cloud over the course of Wednesday night. Sadly, as the various pictures from Dave Lat at Above the Law illustrate, there wasn’t much in the way of age diversity. Tant pis. Still, the kids at the party had fun, and we’re looking forward to hosting the 3d Annual with our friends at Co-Op next time in NYC.
Rick earlier expressed some regret at missing much of the AALS conference. I can say that although I mostly followed Dan Solove’s advice by avoiding panels, there were a few that I went to that were outstanding for one or several reasons. The one I particularly enjoyed was Prawfs alum Kim Ferzan’s Inside the Scholar’s Studio with Carol Sanger, Paul Robinson, and Ian Ayres. I’ve only seen James Lipton spoofed on Saturday Night Live, and not the original show, but I take it that Kim did a good job imitating the genre (e.g., asking for favorite sounds and curse words), and more importantly, a great job at eliciting sage counsel from masters of the art of legal scholarship. Ayres said he tried to write a 1000 words a day in the morning and Robinson also said his preferred regime was writing in the morning. This strategy worked well for me when I was in practice, oddly enough, but now I’m having trouble getting to write in the morning especially on those days when I teach. One hyperproductive friend of mine diagnoses the problem some of us face differently: the issue is not too many days with not enough written, but rather too many days with nothing written at all. Another savvy Ayresism may lie in his response to what “turns him on.” He said: intellectual perversity. To that end, he recounted that when he was younger, he would read a bunch of articles in the top law reviews and then force himself to develop, in one half hour, something to challenge in the articles by flipping things around. It strikes me that this intellectual exercise may be an odd homage to Albert Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction, which stressed perversity, futility, and jeopardy as the standard kinds of responses one hears lodged against progressive agendas or reform proposals. In any event, Ayres was disarmingly candid and charming, especially as he explained the genesis of his “most influential” piece, which he had the good sense to outline while he was waiting and being stood up by a recent ex-girlfriend extracting her revenge against him for failing to break up in person…
Another surprise of the conference, for me at least, was the unusually feisty panel on academic freedom, featuring Robert Post, Elena Kagan, William van Alstyne, Geoffrey Stone, and the inimitable and bare-knuckled Stanley Fish. Here’s an article recapping some of the highlights from that panel. (H/t: Orin.) If the podcast of either panel emerges, it will likely be at this link from the AALS. Both are definitely worth checking out.
Posted by Administrators on January 8, 2007 at 07:06 PM