Law School Conference

This week thousands of law professors and law school staff converge on Washington, DC, for the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). There will be committee meetings, meetings of representatives from all the law schools, and lots of presentations. Here are what some UW speakers will be talking about:

• Elizabeth Coplan, Director of Media Relations & Marketing, is on a panel about partnering with law firms for the Section on Institutional Advancement.
• Associate Dean Penny Hazelton is moderating a panel about law libraries responding to changing curricular and scholarly needs of faculty and students in times of limited resources.
• Prof. Anita Krug is speaking on implementing Dodd-Frank.
• Prof. Joel Ngugi – now Judge Ngugi of Kenya's High Court – is on a panel about the International Criminal Court's focus on Africa.
• Prof. Kate O'Neill is moderating a panel about teaching professional values across the curriculum.
• Prof. Arzoo Osanloo, from the UW's Law, Societies & Justice Program, will speak on marriage and divorce in Islam.

Most of the schedule is worked out well in advance of the meeting, but the organizers save some slots for "hot topics." Prof. Mary Fan is speaking on one of those hot topics, Alternatives to Mass Incarceration: Taking Advantage of the Budget Crisis. See Prof. Fan's article, Beyond Budget-Cut Criminal Justice: The Future of Penal Law, 90 N. Car. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2012), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1804539

Several of our speakers were chosen for their panels based on calls for papers:

• Prof. Kim Ambrose and Assistant Dean Michele Storms are on a panel about faculty-student collaborations and student initiatives.
• Prof. Zahr Said will speak on integrating law and the humanities into the core curriculum.
• Prof. Sallie Sanford will be on a panel about health law professors' projects outside the traditional classroom; her paper is on teaching health law in rural Ethiopia.

Our faculty are also active as chairs of sections and members of committees:

• Prof. Alan Kirtley is chair of the Section of Clinical Legal Education
• Prof. Rafael Pardo is chair of the Section of Creditors' and Debtors' Rights and he is on the Committee on Research
• Dean Kellye Testy is co-chair of the section for law school deans. She is nominated for (and will probably be elected to) the AALS Executive Board, for a three-year term./li>
• Prof. Clark Lombardi is chair-elect of the Section of Islamic Law
• Associate Dean Penny Hazelton is on the Committee on Libraries and Technology

One last UW connection: the Section on Disability Law is presenting a day-long program, Disaster, Disability and Law, whose papers will be published in the Washington Law Review. (This post was updated Jan. 5.)