Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Very successful National Security Court conference, thanks to everyone

The February 1 conference announced in the previous post on the idea of a national security court went off splendidly, and I just want publicly to thank everyone who took part or attended.  We had about 200 people in attendance, which is a remarkably high number.  The lunch at which Judge Brinkema spoke was jam-packed.  And amazingly, people stayed right through the day to the final panel. 

So hooray for us!  Thanks to the panelists and speakers.  Thanks to my co-convenors, Dan Marcus and Steve Vladeck of WCL, and Ben Wittes of Brookings.  And particularly thanks to Jennifer Dabson and all the WCL event staff who made the thing happen.

We had wonderful people on the panels - see the list below.  And we were amazed and honored that people came in from out of town to attend.  We could have filled the panels from the extraordinary people sitting in the audience; the embarrassment of riches was, well, embarrassing.  Likewise, we could have filled the panels with people from my faculty at Washington College of Law, but we made an executive decision to use WCL people only to moderate panels, and give the substantive positions to people from outside the school.

I should also say that it is rare to have an event at a university in which there is a reasonable diversity of political and intellectual views; we were careful in planning to try and achieve that, and it is pretty clear to me that we did.

I hope Brookings, which co-sponsored the event, was as pleased as WCL was.

If you would like to hear audio podcasts - which can either be saved and played as a podcast or else streamed over your computer - of the sessions, you can find them at the WCL website, here.  Click on the first item, WCL podcasts, go down to Feb 1, and you will find sessions 1-3 and Judge Brinkema's address, each as a separate item.

http://www.wcl.american.edu/podcast/podcast.cfm

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