Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

I'm excited to be back after a holiday hiatus and three days in New Orleans attending the Association of American Law Schools 2019 Annual Meeting—the largest annual gathering of legal academics in the country. This week I've got a rundown of highlights from The Big Easy, including the sunnier atmosphere around the eventnow that legal education appears to be rebounding from its long slump. I'm also recapping the many ways that women were in the spotlight, and I'm paying homage to the University of Houston Law Center's Michael Olivas, who was honored with the AALS' highest award. 

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter:@KarenSloanNLJ

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Looking Up

My big takeaway from New Orleans is that the academy is feeling more positive about its future than any time since about 2012. It would be an overstatement to say that professors and deans were skipping around singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” or anything like that (although after a few hours on Bourbon Street you never know….) But the mood around the Hilton where the meeting took place was certainly more hopeful and less dour than in years past. I say this with the caveat that I missed the 2017 and 2018 meetings, but I polled many attendees this time around and to a tee they agreed with my read on the atmosphere of the conference. It's not surprising that people were feeling more optimistic this year. Last year's 8 percent increase in applicants broke a nearly decade long slide, and first-year enrollment grew for the first time since 2010. What remains to be seen is whether that applicant spike is the beginning of a sustained rebound or an anomaly—something I queried many attendees about. While no one was ready to declare that legal education is out of the woods, a number of people told me that early indications are that 2019 will be another strong application cycle.

It's not just the mood in the hallways that leads me to believe that academics are envisioning a rosier future. It was the content of the panels, where just a single panel focused on the financial challenges (and opportunities) law schools face.That's opposed to previous years when numerous sessions touched on how to pull a law school from the brink of financial collapse, how to increase its applicant pool, or just soul searching on why students are staying away. Instead, there were myriad panels dedicated to different aspects of the Trump presidency, Brett Kavanaugh's nomination, and the #MeToo movement (more on that later.)

At the same time, there were also clear indications that the academy is not as flush as it once was. This year's AALS meeting was a pared-back affair as compared with my last visit. Gone was the ritzy opening gala where attendees were bussed off to a notable, off-site location. (In its place was a bar in the exhibit hall where professors mingled among vendors while a jazz band played.) Also gone was the big keynote luncheon in which a big legal name would give remarks and which cost extra to attend.

The closest thing to a keynote this year was remarks by Edwin Cameron, a justice on the Constitutional Court of South Africa who offered plenty of inspiration during an opening plenary with outgoing AALS president and University of Richmond law dean Wendy Perdue. A former anti-Apartheid lawyer, Cameron hailed the role lawyers play in preserving democracy and told the academy, “You carry in your classroom and seminars the future of the country.” No pressure.

Women Take Center Stage

The program at this year's AALS meeting was chock full of panels centered on #MeToo, the contributions of women to the legal profession and legal academy, and the hurdles women still face in both arenas. It wasn't just the subjects of the panels that had a strong female-centric vibe, though. We had Perdue handing over duties to yet another women, Harvard law professor Vicki Jackson. And I noticed what seemed to me to be a higher ratio of women speaking on panels, at least from my last visit to AALS in 2015. I found it refreshing to see so many women being recognized as experts in their fields and that these so-called women's issues were getting so much attention at the meeting. Here's a rundown of those offerings.

➤➤Five separate sessions dealt with different aspects of #MeToo, including Title IX, Brett Kavanaugh, the future of sexual harassment, and the #MeToo movement within courts, law firms, and the legal academy.

➤➤Two sessions highlighted separate oral history projects that aim to capture the voices of women trailblazers within the legal profession and the first generation of women law professors.

➤➤A discussion group tackled gender inequality within the legal academy, both its causes and potential solutions.

I managed to hit a number of these sessions and may have more to say later, but I want to highlight an interesting discussion that emerged during a panel titled #MeToo—The Courts, the Academy, and Law Firms. It featured M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, former co-president of Green Traurig and former ABA President Hilarie Bass, and Columbia law Dean Gillian Lester, among others. One of the themes that continued to surface during that discussion was the need for informal, anonymous reporting avenues to help identify serial harassers. Attorneys, law students and law clerks often calculate that reporting harassment isn't worth the potential hit to their careers due to lost recommendations. But if schools and courts can track anonymous complaints in a centralized way, they can intervene with alleged harassers as soon as patterns emerge without victims facing personal repercussions.

Informal discussions can also help prevent known harassers from cycling through various law firms or law schools, the panelists said. Firms and schools are often loathe to officially disclose when attorneys or professors have been accused of harassment out of fear they will be sued. (Some harassers even negotiate graceful exits with their former firms under which the firms agree to not disclose any problems.) That's why it's important for employees to harness personal connections to have informal discussions about potential hires before signing on the dotted line.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention one trend I found disappointing, which was a lack of men in the rooms at some of these sessions. (Caveat: I wasn't at all the #MeToo panels.) At the session on gender inequality within the legal academy where women professors discussed the hurdles they face, I could count the number of men in the room on one hand. If problems such as pay inequality, the uneven allocation of so-called “service work,” and the disproportionate number of women and minority women in untenured legal writing and clinical positions are going to be addressed, it can't just be women talking to women. Men have to be a part of that discussion, too.

A Rockstar Law Professor

One of my favorite moments from this year's meeting had to be watching Michael Olivas, a longtime University of Houston Law Center professor, accept the AALS' Award for Lifetime Service to Legal Education. The award is the association's highest honor, given every three years.

Part of that is simply because I've known Olivas for years, as an expert in education law and immigration law, as a keen observer of legal education, as a sharp wit, and an all-around nice guy. Olivas certainly doesn't fit the law professor stereotype. There's the ZZ Top-esque beard for one. And he has some rock n' roll bonafides: He hosts a weekly show about the law and rock n' roll on Albuquerque's NPR affiliate.

So it made sense when Olivas took to the AALS podium to the strains the Bob Seger's classic “Old Time Rock and Roll.” (I'll assume that Olivas' upcoming knee replacement surgery is the reason we didn't get a Tom Cruise Risky Business-style dance routine.) Olivas spent the next 15 minutes or so delivering a solid stand-up routine comprised mostly of self-deprecating remarks sprinkled with gratitude for the opportunity to spend nearly four decades teaching law students and mentoring others within the academy. (He studied to become a priest but left the seminary when he realized he preferred “afflicting the comfortable to comforting the afflicted,” he said.) In addition to writing the first casebook on education law, Olivas was instrumental in prompting law schools to hire more Latino professors by public shaming those with none or few on their faculties.

I for one will miss Olivas when he retires from Houston at the end of the academic year. He's a true character and is every bit deserving of one of the legal academy's biggest honor. Congratulations Michael.

Thanks for reading Ahead of the Curve. Sign up for the newsletter and check out past issues here. I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]