Association of American Law Schools Conference 2018

January 9, 2018 | Dean Caron and members of the Pepperdine Law faculty traveled to San Diego to join thousands of law faculty, deans, administrators, and scholars for the 112th Annual Meeting of The Association of American Law Schools (AALS).

Pepperdine's faculty took an active role in this year's event which featured over 250 panel sessions. On Wednesday, Professor Michael Helfand joined the Law & Religion panel on the topic of "Governance, Resistance, and Rejection: Religion and Politics Now." Professor Helfand said, "The conference provided a great opportunity not only to learn about recent work in my field, but also to present some of my recent research on trends in how Jewish institutions have responded to religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court over the past 100 years."

Professor Kristine Knaplund presented her paper, "Women and Wills in 1900 St. Louis" at the Section on Trusts and Estates program on "Historical and Empirical Evidence and the Law of Trusts and Estates: What Really Happened?" And on Friday, Professor Rob Anderson presented his paper with George Dent (Case Western) entitled, "Institutional Investors, Investment Horizons, and Corporate Governance" at the Business Associations panel.

In addition, Professor Trey Childress was named Chair of the Conflict of Law Section, and Professor Emeritus Grant Nelson was honored as an AALS Teacher of the Year for 2017. At the companion Federalist Society Conference, Professor Victoria Schwartz moderated a works-in-progress panel and presented her paper, "The Celebrity Stock Market."

Professor Schwartz added, "Typically, we are presenting at conferences with specialists in our respective fields. What I enjoyed about this conference format is that on both the panel where I spoke and the panel I moderated there were a wide variety of papers covering a vast spectrum of areas.  This allows me to get exposure to topics and scholars I wouldn't typically get to address or hear speak in my subject-area conferences."

Before the conference concluded, Pepperdine Law invited San Diego alumni for a lively gathering with attending faculty. And, as a final capstone to the AALS conference, Dean Caron hosted nearly 50 law professors and deans from other universities for a Hamilton-imbued reception.