Conferences / Symposia

How To Have Fun As A Law Professor

It’s beginning to look a lot like … AALS! With your help, we will make AALS a fun and interesting event.

By LawProfBlawg on December 15, 2015 2:00 pm

It’s beginning to look a lot like … AALS!   For the uninitiated, AALS is the Association of American Law Schools. Or Academics Are Lost Souls. Something like that. Regardless, like the swallows come back to Capistrano, professors return to AALS each January to listen to multiple days of scholarship presentations, chat with friends, crash law school receptions, and otherwise just party on until 8 p.m. or so.

However, AALS can get quite tedious. There are only so many times you can hear someone make the same argument again in yet the 138th iteration of the same work. This caused me to propose an alternative list of fun things to do.

It occurs to me I’ve missed a few ways to have fun at AALS. Law professors, this column is for you.

  1. Troll your favorite “academic.” Someone at another school being annoying? Let’s suppose some partisan on Twitter took your idea down the slippery slope right into the straw person logical fallacy.   And let’s suppose he doesn’t know you. Wouldn’t it be fun to walk up to that semi-famous Constitutional Law professor and tell him how brilliant he is, all the while taking his arguments down a slippery slope?
  2. Download the AALS app to your phone. When a stranger walks by, say, “Yes, I found all the scholars listed! I win! I win!” Talk up how the app has made the conference more fun.
  3. Go to a law school reception, and stereotype the school. Hey Vermont, I’m disappointed you aren’t offering maple leaf drinks. Georgetown? Be all confused when they inform you the school is not in Jamaica.
  4. If you manage to make it to a panel, pretend you are an Olympic judge. This is more fun if you can get friends involved. At the end of a talk, each of you should hold up a board with a score. “9.8!   9.8!   9.5!”
  5. Don’t wear a nametag. When someone dares ask who you are, say, “I’m sorry. I’m under a nondisclosure agreement.”
  6. Talk about how you won the naming contest for AALS 2017. AALS names are always something like “Legal Education at the Crossroads” or “The Fork in the Road of Legal Education.” Say you won by naming the theme for AALS 2017 with “Legal Education Tied Up on the Railroad Tracks in Front of the Oncoming Freight Train of Disruptive Technology.”
  7. Stand in the corner and re-enact the ending of “Blair Witch Project.” If you haven’t seen the movie, never mind.
  8. Ask where the Information Desk session is.
  9. Walk into an AALS Hot-Topic Program playing Madonna’s Burning Up.
  10. Walk into any joint program and ask if it has to do with marijuana. Storm out disappointed.   Be sure to be carrying Twinkies when you do this.
  11. Walk into any session and ask what time the play starts. Say you’ve heard the actor who plays Aladdin is excellent.
  12. At the Justice Breyer book signing, ask where Notorious RBG is because you really want her
  13. Go to the Socio-Economics panel and ask: “What’s the best way to get my scholarship on the socio-path?”
  14. Walk up to someone from an elite school. Pretend you have never heard of the school. Be sure to ask about the weather there. “Now, you say you’re from Harvard. Where is that exactly? Where are you all in the U.S. News Rankings? Cambridge, is that close to Boston?”
  15. The students who guard the entrances to the panels are diligent people. However, they are very bored, too. Try to make things fun for them:
    1. Pretend you are wearing a badge that is invisible.
    2. Swap badges with a friend of a different gender.
    3. Praise them. “Good job! Make sure none of those loons get out of that room.”
    4. Give them sympathy. “Yeah, when I spoke out during a panel discussion they made me sit outside, too.”
  16. If you go on the Environmental Law field trip, be sure to talk about how impressed you are with clean coal technologies. Alternatively, start a folk song sing along.
  17. Talk about how you have decided law review articles are worthless because no one ever reads them and the next groundbreaking venue for law scholarship is Twitter — once they get the footnote ability right.
  18. Ask someone how many panels he or she is on. If the number is more than one, give them a card to a psychotherapist to deal with his or her self-esteem issues. Look at the person as if he or she is disturbed.
  19. Live tweet a panel, but only use generic descriptions. “Panelist said insightful comment about scholarship.” “Panelist said scholarship good.”
  20. Make a survey form and grade each panel. However, make the form about things one typically sees in an AALS panel. Example (rate from 1 for not good to 5 for excellent):
    1. The panelist self-cited sufficiently to show how smart he or she is.
    2. The panelist name-dropped enough to show he or she knows other smart people.
    3. The panelist ran over on allotted time to show he or she is more important than other panelists/can’t time manage.
    4. The panelist made sufficient facial expressions to demonstrate thought about other panelists’ thoughts.
    5. The panelist read from his or her PowerPoint sufficiently.
    6. The moderator explained to the five audience members how groundbreaking and important the panel is.

    21. Turn the form into the moderator.

With your help, we will make AALS a fun and interesting event. And no, don’t think for a moment I missed the value AALS makes in terms of important scholarly contributions (the kind that the same people make to the same people year in and year out). Those are important (to those same people). And no, I’m not bitter because AALS declined to approve my proposal. I’m bitter because I want AALS to be in Hawaii.

LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here and on Twitter (@lawprofblawg). Email him at [email protected].