On the Road

Heading to Atlanta today for a "roundtable" at Emory Law School on "Climate in a Time of Dissensus." I've been busily scribbling a belated paper for the conference on recent game theoretic articles offering strategies with the potential to reduce free-riding in international climate negotiations. More specifically, I'm focusing on a recent paper by Geoffrey Heal and Howard Kunreuther, avaialable (behind a paywall) here, assessing prospects for "tipping sets" to more negotiations to a more cooperative equilibrium. I may post my comments later, after getting some feedback at the conference, which should be useful. Other participants include Harvard Law Prof., and former #2 in the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change, Jody Freeman, my good friend Jonathan Nash and his Emory colleague Bill Buzbee, Ann Carlson (UCLA), and Andre Greene (Toronto).

SPEA Retreat

I spent all afternoon today at a retreat organized by the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) Faculty Group on Governance and Management. More than two dozen members of the SPEA faculty, both junior and senior scholars, gave brief introductions to ourselves and our work. Every one of the presentations was fascinating. I was highly impressed at the caliber of my new SPEA colleagues, and am very excited to be working with them.

Here are my two favorite phrases from today's presentations:

     "empirically proven moral adjectives;" and

     "civicky things".

The retreat took place at the Stone Age Institute, north of Bloomington. It's a very interesting place in a bucolic setting. It seems to be a well-kept secret around Bloomington - I had never heard of it prior to the initial announcement of this retreat - but I look forward to returning for future events there.

What If?

I'm attending a very interesting conference this morning organized by my esteemed colleague Gerard Magliocca, and sponsored by the Indiana Law Review, on "What If? Counterfactuals in Constitutional History."

I've long been a fan of counterfactual analysis in law. I've even written a couple of  related articles (one of which is available here) based, in part, on a constitutional counterfactual question: What if the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution did not include the Taking Clause? Put differently, how much of a difference does constitutional/judicial protection of private property from government over-regulation and expropriation really make? By comparing constitutional protection of private property in the US with the system of almost purely political protection of private property in the UK, I concluded that the case for constitutional protection is not very strong.

Today's conference includes several interesting panels, featuring  papers by a wonderful group of panelists, including:

Amanda Tyler on "The Counterfactual that Came to Pass: What If the Founders Had Not Constitutionalized the Privilege of the Write of Habeas Corpus"

Ilya Somin, "What If Kelo Had Gone the Other Way?"

Alison LaCroix, "What If Madison Had Really Won? Legislative v. Judicial Supremacy"

Kim Roosevelt, "What If Slaughterhouse Had Been Decided Differently?"

Heidi Kitrosser, "What If Daniel Ellsberg Hadn't Bothered?"

Carlton Larson, "What If Chief Justice Fred Vinson Hadn't Died in 1953?"

The Nature of Academic Conferences

Stanley Fish has a nice column in today's New York Times (here) about the nature of the academic enterprise. His main claim, with which I agree, is that the primary purpose of academic work and meetings is not to derive normative conclusions with direct relevance for policy, but to ask and argue about big issues outside of the policy-making pressure cooker.

Fish explains that a conference he recently attended on "originalism" in constitutional interpretation was a success, not because it resolved substantive problems in the world, but because "a set of intellectual problems had been tossed around and teased out by men and women at the top of their game," who " were more than willing to do the hard work involved in trying to get things straight." They were "willing and eager, that is, to do academic work."

Snow Day

I was supposed to drive to Bloomington early this morning for the "mini-conference" at the Workshop, where I was to present a paper and chair a panel. Unfortunately, 3-5 inches of snow and high winds have made the drive too treacherous, and I've decided to stay home. I hate disappointing my friends and colleagues at the Workshop, but I think my informal risk assessment was a good one. I've sent my PowerPoint slides to someone who is intimately familiar with the work I was to present; he will probably do a better job than I could have done anyway; and nearly anyone present can serve as a fill-in chair for the other panel.

Overall, I'd say missing the mini-conference because of bad weather is less disappointing than the last conference I was forced to miss because bad weather in another city severely disrupted my travel plans: that conference was in Aix-en-Provence, and the bad weather that prevented me getting there was in Philadelphia.

I will take the snow-day opportunity to start grading exams and do some prep for next semester's Climate Law & Policy course.