AALS Plenary Sessions Challenge Legal Faculty to Reassessing Their Roles as Scholars and Educators

The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) will hold its Annual Meeting in New York, New York from January 2-6, 2008. With over 3,500 law faculty expected to gather, AALS President, Nancy Rogers, The Ohio State University, chose as the meeting theme: Reassessing Our Roles as Scholars and Educators in Light of Change. Three plenary sessions, to be held Friday, January 4 from 2:15 to 4:00 p.m., will use this theme as the platform for discussion.

The Seattle/Louisville Ruling: Constriction or Expansion of Race-Based Policies?

What are the implications for law schools of the Supreme Court's 2007 ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1? Have Justice Kennedy and the dissenters broadened what may be compelling state interests? Does Justice Powell's opinion change what was permissible under Grutter? Does anything remain of Justice O'Connor's reasoning in Grutter that law schools "in particular" produce "a large number of our Nation's leaders," and does this differentiate law schools from the reasoning in the Seattle/Louisville ruling? The panelists will offer and discuss a variety of viewpoints on the future of law school diversity in light of this ruling and include John A. Powell (Ohio State); Kimberle Williams Crenshaw (UCLA); Goodwin Liu (California, Berkeley); Charles Ogletree (Harvard); and Reva B. Siegel (Yale).

Rethinking Legal Education For The 21st Century

Law schools are complex, ongoing institutions, and the age of its educational model can be regarded as tradition as well as obsolescence. External demands for change are not insistent; employers seem willing to train starting lawyers on the job, the ABA has been quiescent since the MacCrate Report -- which found more resonance among practicing lawyers than legal academics -- and universities are typically content to tax their law schools and be done with them. Most of the material incentives for legal academics these days depend on scholarly production, so it is not always easy to engage a law school faculty in educational reform. Nonetheless, as conscientious educators, many legal academics are increasingly committed to new approaches that recognize the tremendous changes in both the substance of law and legal practice and the understandings of and approaches to learning that have occurred during the past century. This plenary session will provide a general picture of the possibilities for changing legal education, and the challenges that such changes necessarily confront. The subject encompasses both curriculum and pedagogy: content and form; at the same time, the session will consider the related processes of institutional change. It will describe new ideas that are currently in operation or under consideration at various law schools, the major recommendations of the Carnegie Foundation report, and some aspects of learning theory that support these ideas and recommendations. It will also explore the role of change agents, the difficulties they face, and some strategies for their success. Finally, the session will assess the need for change and the limitations on its potential scope.

This panel features Edward L. Rubin (Vanderbilt) as moderator and the following speakers: Vicki C. Jackson (Georgetown); Robert Mac Crate (Esq., Senior Counsel, Sullivan and Cromwell, New York, New York); Martha L. Minow (Harvard); Suellyn Scarnecchia (New Mexico); William M. Sullivan (Senior Scholar The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Palo Alto, California); and Judith W. Wegner (North Carolina).

E-Expertise: How blogs, SSRN, Listservs, On-line Research Resources, and Other Electronic Technologies are Changing the Legal Academy of the 21st Century

Through blogs, vlogs, on-line treatises, and more, law professors share their expertise and secure reactions to ideas more quickly and broadly than was possible in printed form. Should we counsel our junior colleagues to embrace e-expertise? Is the net effect positive if the quantity of law review articles and books decreases? How does one assess the quality of the contributions that are posted without an intermediary? Will the new surrogates for judging quality (hits, downloads, citations) influence those who share e-expertise to shape it in particular ways? The questions push us back to first principles in terms of judging teaching, scholarship, and service. Are some audiences more important to reach than others? What contributions to these audiences should law schools most value? This panel features: Katharine T. Bartlett (Duke) as the moderator and the following speakers: Jack M. Balkin (Yale); Paul Butler (George Washington); Robert Katzmann (Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, New York, New York); Eugene Volokh (UCLA).

The entire AALS 2008 Annual Meeting program can be found on the Association's Web site at http://www.aals.org/am2008/. Members of the press are invited to attend free of charge. Those interested in attending are asked to notify Deborah Quick from January 2-6, 2007 at (202) 745-2116. Press also may register on-site at the AALS office located in the Gibson Suite on the Second Floor of the Hilton New York beginning Wednesday after 6:00 p.m. January 2, 2008, and continuing through Sunday, January 6, 2008.