Good to be back

Greetings, Prawfs readership. It is a pleasure to come back in the summer and share my thoughts on white collar crime, corporate wrongdoing, and the legal profession and academy. I just came back from Law & Society, one of the large conferences I regularly attend. For me, the conference is particularly useful because my scholarship tends to focus on multiple fields and draws from several disciplines. So it is a form of one-stop shopping for me. Usually, I leave the conference with a keener idea of what I want to write over the next eighteen months. So let me register one very odd sounding complaint: next year, the conference is in Hawaii. Yes, I am complaining about that. First, it vastly increases the cost of the trip for many of us, which our schools may or may not cover, depending on various policies (yes, it may be cheaper for my west coast friends, but they already benefitted from the fact that the conference was in San Francisco this year). Second, it lengthens unnecessarily the amount of time many of us have to spend away from our families through extra travel (and no, I cannot bring my family because my kids are still in school at the beginning of June). And third, I think it undermines the seriousness of the conference with our respective home school administrations. We are, after all, asking our schools to pay the costs of our attendance because we believe the conference will further our research agendas and contribute to our understanding of other disciplines. I don't think it helps us when the conference takes place in such an obvious resort/vacation spot. That is not to say that we shouldnt enjoy the home city in which the conference is held (San Fran was great, except it was really cold!). But I don't think it has to be such an obvious vacation locale. Am I in total left field on this one?