SEALS thoughts

For a variety of geographic and other reasons, my SEALS participation this year involved just two days of driving the 50 miles to the Boca Resort. And I will have to miss the MarkelFest! Happy Hour. I did have two random thoughts after the jump.

1) I was struck by what I thought was the rise of the discussion group and an initial sense that discussion groups now outnumber panels. It turns out there still are more panels, although the numbers are almost even (excluding the New Scholars panels), but that still reflects a pretty significant increase in the number of discussion groups. And I see the benefits of having more discussion groups--they allow us to hear from more voices about more things and create more of a conversation than a panel of often-unrelated talks. Even the one panel I did (the SCOTUS Individual Rights Review) was conducted as more of a discussion format and was, I think, a lot of fun for just that reason.

2) Kudos to SEALS on the two-sided name tags, so that the name is showing no matter which side the plastic card is facing. Nothing worse than trying to place someone but their card is flipped over.