Academic

Many (most? all?) academic disciplines other than law have an annual conference, which is devoted to networking, workshops, paper sessions, lectures, etc. While the conferences, such as the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, have many dimensions, the academic content is the driving force behind the conference.

The Association of American Law Schools holds an annual meeting each January, and despite recent advances -- for example, many sections now base their programs on a call for papers -- the academic content of AALS remains rather sparse. Those interested in business associations, for example, can expect one paper session and a panel from the Section on Business Associations. Other sections may have programs of interest, but in a good year, I find three or four academic programs that attract my attention.

The conception of the Law & Society Annual Meeting as the default academic conference for law professors was suggested to me this week by a friend, and I think he may be right. The range of topics represented at this year's meeting is impressive, including a large number of sessions on business law. Unlike the American Law & Economics Association Annual Meeting -- which is a great conference, and I don't intend this comparison as a slight -- LSA is largely unbounded by methodological constraints. "Society" used to imply (to my mind, at least) an empirical orientation using sociological methods, which are anyway quite diverse. But LSA has embraced the "big tent" view of law and society, and it shows in the sessions. Many groups, including our small band of law and entrepreneurship scholars, use LSA as a platform for organizing a "conference within a conference," and this has resulted in a much richer conference than in years past. I hope that LSA continues to allow or even encourage this development because law professors benefit from having a discipline-wide academic conference, and AALS does not seem well positioned to providing it.