The academic year starts tonight with the first-year dinner, an event I think I've attended each of my 18 (!) years here. I was curious to see if I'd ever blogged about it, and it seems I did in 2005's First-Year Dinner Report:
One of the self-imposed duties that comes with the job is attending the dinner we give to welcome first-year students. If that sentence sounds as if the dinner isn't something I look forward to, well consider these facts:
- The dinner consumes scarce and expensive baby-sitting resources (my wife and I both teach at UM; we both feel we have to go)
- The preprandial cocktail party is held outdoors at one of the most oppressive and sweltering times of the year
- I am always the designated driver and thus the open bar is just adding insult to injury
- I have to smile a lot
- I don't teach any first year classes, so many students seem disappointed to meet me, focused as they are on what they fear is an upcoming first-year ordeal.
This year was no exception as to points 1-4, but very different on point 5: a surprising number of incoming students had found this blog, so they seemed happy to put a face to the rants.
And I happened to sit with some extraordinary students at dinner:
- A Romanian (from Transylvania, no less), with a philosophy Ph.D from Stanford, supervised by Richard Rorty
- An American fresh back from working in Niger
- A Polish-born American who recently resigned a commission in US Army intelligence (in part, he said, because the failure to prosecute commanders for recent atrocities — an absence of command responsibility — suggested a failure among our leaders to hew to the ideals he had been taught he was serving).
- A Kazakhstani national here on a Fullbright whose English is flawless.
And these were not our international LL.M. students, who are always wonderfully experienced and diverse. These are a random sample of our J.D. students.
One could have quite a bit of fun teaching in a place full of students like that…
Of course, some things have changed since 2005:
- We don't need baby-sitters any more;
- The Dean's office stopped holding the cocktail part of the reception in the sweltering and potentially rainy Biltmore courtyard, and instead booked a nice large room;
- The idea of standing for an hour even if not in the heat seems potentially physically challenging, so rather than making a point to be on time, I'll probably be a bit late for the cocktail part;
- I teach a first-year class: Torts.
It's still an event in which I have to smile a lot, but maybe there's something to smile about. No word yet on who's driving, though.
The University of Miami School of Law will host a celebration in honor of the appointment of Jan Paulsson as the Michael Klein Distinguished Scholar Chair. Paulsson, who joined the law school in the academic year 2009-10, is head of the public international law and international arbitration groups at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, and has had his professional base in Paris for 30 years. He is currently the President of the World Bank Administrative Tribunal and the London Court of International Arbitration, and he was recently elected president of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration (ICCA) and vice president of the International Chamber of Commerce International Court of Arbitration.
