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 indication of how much of an errant law professor I've been.
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