There is No Limit Except on My Availability

There is no limit to the number of "Future of Legal Scholarship" conferences that can be held. I am not sure how many there have been so far but my guess is hundreds. We are only scratching the surface. The second generation will be a Conference on Conferences on the Future of Legal Scholarship. And, then (you know it's coming) the Conference on Conferences on Conferences on the Future of Legal Scholarship. The funny thing is that, as a matter relative to most legal scholarship, these will be no less useful than most of what fills the majority of law reviews.


Law professors, if nothing else, are fussy. In the dictionary you could have a picture of a law professor beside the word fussy and that would tell the whole story. I mean they are fussy about the food they eat (when we have lunch at my law school the caterer has to have 22 varieties of food for every diet: my favorite is the selection for low-salt-vegans-with-peanut-allergies-and-soft gum disease),  when they teach, the days they teach, the rooms they teach in, the arrangement of the chairs at a conference, the location of their offices, the art on the walls, and so on. I am not making most of this up.


An emerging version of fussy is when they will be available after classes end and before the exam. Today I was asked in class,  "How late is too  late to ask questions?" My answer: "Once I hand out the exam, no more questions."  There was a gasp. I asked,  "What's up. Is that surprising? "Oh," a couple informed me, "Our other teachers have cut off dates." I asked why.


Reason one: If I do not have cut off date everyone will ask questions at the last minute and it will be too crowed. I smiled at this one but I wondered, once you have a cut off date won't there be a rush to make it by the cut off date creating the very same issue.


Reason two: I might be writing the exam and if you ask a question it may affect how I answer the question. I thought "so what." Plus writing the exam a week or two before the end of the semester might address this supposed problem.


Reason three: If I answer your question it may disadvantage the students who did not think to ask the same question. As I understand it, under this line of reasoning you would never answer any question with out recording the answer (video, of course) and playing it back for the entire class.


Reason four: Hey, this is my time off. Don't bother me!!