As the annual ABA DR Section Conference quickly approaches, I want to encourage everyone to attend the Legal Educators’ Colloquium on Saturday April 21^st.  The LEC always promises great programming and this year’s schedule is fantastic.  And I don’t say that simply because 6 of the 8 contributors to this blog will be presenting.

More specifically I want to highlight the Opening Program entitled Approaches to Scholarship in ADR starring, among others, 3 of the gang of 6 mentioned above.  It looks great and I expect there to be a full house.  The program description is below.  See you there !!

Research and writing is a challenge for any new law professor, and perhaps particularly so in ADR.  From the scholar’s perspective, ADR is both feast and famine: on the one hand, ADR scholars enjoy a wealth of relevant legal and interdisciplinary resources to consult, although these can sometimes be disorienting and difficult to manage well; on the other hand, many of us (unlike many of our our non-ADR colleagues) don’t have a steady supply of legal cases to interpret and work from.   The field is accordingly both broad and narrow for the legal ADR academic, and framing one’s scholarship as “legal scholarship” can present its own set of difficulties, depending on the faculty context. This panel will explore the challenges in ADR scholarship by drawing on the experiences of several established ADR scholars.  Topics will include establishing one’s scholarly identity within ADR; choosing between specialty and general journals; deciding whether and how to collaborate; managing interdisciplinary sources and outside practice work; and positioning one’s scholarship within the broader faculty context.