Dan Cole's Dubious Memorabilia

After the AALS conference in San Diego, I drove up to Los Angeles to spend a week with old friends I had not seen for more than 30 years. Two of them were my professors from Occidental College: Alan Chapman and Hal Lauter, Alan now teaches grad-level music theory courses at USC and hosts the morning program on its classical music station, KUSC, which is where I visited with him. Alan is as youthful as ever; still writing fun tunes and performing on occasion, sometimes with his entire family (btw, his son is a phenomenal mallet player). Hal Lauter taught me philosophy all the way through college, becoming my first intellectual mentor. He's 93 now but in great physical and mental condition. Izabela was with me for the first few nights in LA. We stayed in Pasadena, in part because I remembered the town better than most other places in the LA basin. During my senior year of college, I had lived just up Lake St. in Altadena. Seeing that old house again brough back a lot of sweet memorie...

 I'm attending the AALS conference for the first time in at least a dozen years. I've never thought much of it as an academic conference. It's really more about networking, which is not in my skill set. I've come this time to serve as a mentor to younger environmental law scholars. They prepare papers and I provide them presumably valuable feedback. My friend and colleague Rob Fischman started this program several years ago. I also came because it provides another kind of bookend to my career. I used to attend nearly every year when I first started teaching, though the size of the conference and all the social events organized around it were anxiety-inducing. Usually, unless I had a presentation to make or was in another panel I found interesting, I would stay in my hotel room working. Eventually, I found smaller, more focused conferences (most of which were only partly related to law) to be more attractive and comfortable for me. I guess it's just another indicatio...