On today’s agenda were some really fabulous panels.  There are so many interesting people that I met and want to spend more time talking to.I am going to break this post up into several posts because of the richness at this conference.

The first panel of the day was one titled Legacies of the Civil Rights Movement with really fabulous presentations including Reconstructing Hate Crime Law: Racism, Abolition and the Thirteenth Amendment by Jacob Kang-Brown; Strategic Affirmative Action, by Bret Asbury of Dexel Law School; Southern Exceptionalism or New South? “White Trash” and the Politics of Southern Modernization, 1944-1969 by Kristine Taylor; and The Community and the Zone: Competing Conceptions of Neighborhood Identity in Land Use law by my friend Kenneth Stahl of Chapman’s law school.

Of course, Kirstine’s talk was of particular interest given our interest in southern literature, race, and the law.  I kept wondering how Robert Penn Warren would conceptualize the question of southern exceptionalism versus the new south.  Perhaps I will post a discussion of Warren’s ethnography titled Segregation in the next few weeks.

I also want to say that Kenneth Stahl’s The Community and the Zone was a compelling treatment of the Chicago School.  Robert Park’s narratives of the city remain a compelling narrative that, as Kenneth points out, form a distinctive basis for the legal rules that limit neighborhood autonomy.

More from Vegas tomorrow.