Legal Commentary

Sorry for a slow blogging week this week ? I?ve been totally preoccupied with the last-minute preparations for the Criminal Appeals Conference next week, which I?ve organized with my colleague Chad Oldfather.  With a lull in the preparations today, though, I thought I would share some thoughts ? questions, really ? about when and how to organize academic conferences.

First, should untenured professors organize conferences?  When I started teaching, a more senior colleague advised me that he had made a big mistake when he decided to put on a multiday academic conference very early in his career; he found the administrative burdens to be a major distraction from his writing.  Heeding my colleague?s admonition, I waited until after tenure before I organized my first conference, which was on plea bargaining.  Now nearing the end of preparations for my second, I do appreciate my colleague?s warnings about how much work goes into making an event like this happen.  On the other hand, I?ve had a couple of advantages he did not: I have had a co-organizer for both of my conferences, and my law school?s administrative support staff has become much more experienced and capable in dealing with conference logistics.  For untenured professors with these advantages, I would not necessarily advise against conference-organizing.

Of course, one should not just do a conference for the sake of doing a conference.

Especially for an academic in his or her early years, there should be a clear sense of how the conference connects to and supports the scholarly agenda.  Although much of the work in preparing for a conference is purely administrative, there is a substantive dimension to defining the topic and identifying the right speakers to invite.  A conference can also help one to develop relationships with others who write in the same field, and to draw attention to one?s scholarship.  On the other hand, I wonder if blogging, email, and SSRN now provide much more efficient means to these same ends.  More ambitiously, a conference can serve to mark the emergence or maturation of a new school of thought, lending clearer definition to its content and its strengths and weaknesses.  As an exemplar, I think of Erik Luna?s terrific restorative justice conference at Utah in 2002 (when Erik was still a junior faculty member).

This leads to a second question: how focused should a conference topic be?  In my two conferences, my basic approach has been to define a topic broadly (plea bargaining or criminal appeals), invite a diverse group of interesting thinkers who have written on the topic in the past, and give them complete freedom to present on any aspect of the broad topic.  When I have been invited to conferences myself, I have always appreciated such broadly defined topics, especially to the extent they allow me to speak on something I was planning to write about soon anyway.  If I were to define the topic of a conference more narrowly to track my own idiosyncratic interests, I would be concerned about my ability to draw an audience and a full roster of speakers.  On the other hand, a conference that is too broadly conceived may lose its sense of coherence.  Also, if one?s goal is to create a ?moment? for a new issue or school of thought, that goal will probably not be reached without a deliberately focused definition of the topic.

Finally, who should the audience be?  I have attended some conferences that have plainly been conceptualized as academics talking to academics, but others that have just as plainly been designed for a larger, more diverse audience, including students and practitioners.  I have taken the latter approach with my two conferences.  If my law school is footing the bill to fly in a bunch of smart people from around the country to have an interesting conversation, it seems only natural to try serve as many institutional interests as possible through that conversation, including teaching and community outreach interests.  Moreover, I?ve found that law students and practitioners, while perhaps not as steeped in the scholarly literature as academics, often have valuable comments and questions that inject important practical considerations into scholarly discussions.  On the other hand, there are perhaps some drawbacks to the ?big audience? approach.  If nothing else, it adds considerably to the administrative burdens.  It also creates a more formal atmosphere, which may be less conducive to free-flowing, creative conversation among the academics. 

These are some of the questions on my mind right now about academic conferences.  I?d be interested in hearing others? views about what the important questions are.