Virtual Law and Society: A Response to Bridget Crawford

I was asked by the leadership of the Law and Society Association to post this letter responding to Bridget Crawford's posts about the LSA conference here and here.  That seems fair and here it is:

-------------------------------

We’re writing as the president, immediate past president and 2020 program co-chairs of the Law and Society Association to set the record straight about this year’s Law and Society Annual Meeting. Unfortunately, a number of Professor Bridget Crawford’s representations of LSA’s actions in her posts on the Faculty Lounge Blog are inaccurate.

The Law and Society Association’s Board of Trustees recently decided to cancel the annual in-person meeting which had been scheduled for late May, as have all other professional associations we know. But the Board didn’t want to lose the opportunity to bring our LSA community together as much as we could, so the Board decided at the same time to convert the in-person meeting into a virtual conference instead. We notified conference attendees as soon as the decision was made to replace an in-person meeting with a virtual one, so that they would know as much as we did, even though we didn’t have all plans in place for what the virtual conference would look like. We understand that the lack of concrete information has generated many questions among persons considering whether to not to participate in the virtual meeting, but we are working as fast as we can to provide more detail. We are all facing an unprecedented situation in which we all learning new technologies at a moment’s notice, and the Law and Society Association is no different. We ask for your patience as we feel our way in this new environment.

Let us tell you what we know so far.

ON REFUNDS: At the time that LSA made the announcement to go virtual, everyone who wanted to withdraw from the virtual conference was invited to do so and promised a full refund of the initial conference registration fee. That full refund offer still stands. The LSA office will refund all cancellations and, as of the week of 6 April, had already done so with all requests received by then. If a backlog of requests develops, the office will work to process and fulfil them as soon as possible. We hope that our conference attendees will recognize that an office staff of four people is processing numerous and varied requests relating to a meeting of nearly 2500 registrants, at the same time that it is gearing up to create a new program in a completely new format. We ask for your patience, but assure you that full refunds will be issued for those who choose not to join us in virtuality.

In fact, LSA is going further than has been the norm and is processing full refunds for people who withdrew at the point in the annual cycle when we thought we were still meeting in person and refunds (by longstanding policy) covered only half the registration fee after a certain date. LSA is making full refunds to those who cancelled under the half-refund policy even if people don’t ask for that refund. If Professor Crawford knows of people who have not gotten their refunds, we suggest she tell them to contact the LSA office. It is frustrating to have the LSA be accused of fraud and refusing refunds when we know of no case where that has happened. Our intent is to refund in full all who decide not to attend the virtual meeting and who ask by the deadline.

ON DEADLINES: As we have started planning a virtual meeting, it became clear that the size of the meeting affects virtually everything about how we can arrange it -- from the technology we use to the time zones we will take into account in setting up the virtual panels. That is why the deadline for letting us know whether participants are still registered was set at 15 April. Yes, we know that not all details of the meeting are fixed yet, but the latest of several email updates to all attendees just went out the week before the deadline. We hope that this answers many questions as people consider whether or not to participate in the virtual meeting.

We had to set the deadline when we did because until we know the size of the meeting we’re planning, how many panels will collapse and how many will remain, and where our virtual participants are located, we cannot organize the program to let people know exactly which dates and times the meeting will be “on.” We will keep providing updates as soon as we know more details, but this is a hard chicken-and-egg problem in which we can’t say exactly what the meeting will look like until we get commitments from those who still want to participate and those who are asked to make commitments would love to know answers that can’t be known until we learn the size of the meeting. We hope that our conference friends trust us enough to know that, if they want to be part of this virtual meeting, we will accommodate everyone as much as we possibly can. For example, we intend to cluster Collaborative Research Network panels together to provide a sense of community for those involved and to not require anyone wake up in the middle of the night in their time zone to participate. We will update everyone as soon as we know how we can organize what’s left of the meeting. But to do that well, we need to know early who is still on board.

ON THE SHAPE OF THE VIRTUAL MEETING: Law and Society has never had a virtual meeting before. But we have quickly learned that a virtual meeting is not just a collection of free Zoom sessions as if we just put the in-person meeting online. For one thing, we can’t expect meeting attendees to spend 12 straight hours online, showing up for panels, talking with friends and intensely interacting through a screen. So first, we will reduce the number of hours each day that the meeting is “on.” Because we will not be meeting in the same time zone, we have to consider how to make the meeting inclusive when it spans the globe, which may mean meeting at different times each day. (About half of LSA’s meeting attendees are from outside the US.) Normally, an LSA meeting has about 40 simultaneous sessions. Between persons understandably dropping out and the limits of technology, we cannot and will not reproduce that level of complexity in a virtual format.

It is clear that we will need professional assistance to keep many sessions running at once without technical glitches that would interfere with the quality of the meeting. That is why we are engaging with a company that has experience in running virtual meetings for academic associations to work out the mechanics so that we don’t lose a lot of meeting time while everyone fiddles with a new technology. That said, it also clear to us that there are some things we can do even better with an online meeting than in a physical meeting. For example, we are exploring ways to provide an “on demand” function for those panels whose participants agree to be recorded so that their sessions can be streamed for some fixed period after the panel so that those who cannot attend in real time can tune in later. That is one way to solve a recurring LSA in-person frustration which is having to choose between multiple compelling LSA panels at the same time.

We are also exploring ways to reproduce what is so special about the LSA meeting – which is the chance to meet old friends, to make new friends, and to see people at receptions, in the hallways, during the social side of the meetings. Among the ideas we are considering are: having online receptions in which we can use a breakout group function to put attendees into smaller groups so that they can get to know new people. We are also exploring leaving panel sessions open online for a half hour after each session so that those who attended can carry on conversations after the formal panel is over, as well as organizing both business meetings and receptions for the CRNs (collaborative research networks) to bring together people who work on common topics. We’re open to all suggestions about how to do this and we’ve been consulting widely with other academic associations who are also facing the issue of how to make a successful in-person meeting virtual. We want to reproduce as much as possible the lovely collegial feel of the LSA meeting, and looking for ways to use the technology to assist.

ON BUDGET: Professor Crawford complained about the cost of a virtual meeting, because LSA Board decided not to offer everyone a partial refund. In fact, a virtual meeting is not free. The largest cost that goes into the meeting is the staff time that it takes to put the program together, which often involves multiple interactions with thousands of people. This year, the program will have been put together twice. One program had almost been completed for an in-person meeting that won’t happen. Now we need to see who will continue into the virtual meeting because that will require that the program be redone a second time to put newly orphaned papers onto new panels, to fill in gaps of chairs and discussants, and to work with the CRNs to ensure that their programs remain coherent. All that involves staff time. Plus there will be adjustments to the app, working out when people can attend the online sessions, updates to conference attendees and to the CRNs about how the program is coming along, and of course close support of conference attendees in the run-up to the meeting.

The virtual meeting also incurs technology costs. Because of the complexity of this event, we are in the process of hiring a tech firm who will provide people who know the technology on call throughout the program to make sure that it all runs smoothly, and we may have to hire people in multiple shifts as we try to time-shift the program so that people in different time zones can participate. While we may in fact use Zoom as one of the components of this virtual meeting as well as facilities kindly donated free of charge by Go-To-Meeting, the program we envision is not just a strung-together set of video-conference meetings using freely available software.

When LSA’s initial notice of cancellation went out and asked people to donate registration fees to the Association if they could afford to do so, it was not meant to squeeze money out of impecunious faculty or to get universities to subsidize our costs if their faculty are not able to participate. The notice was meant to communicate the Board decision as soon as possible and to find a way to cover the salaries of those who work for the Association and the costs we will need to incur to make the meeting work smoothly. We’re not trying to gouge our friends; we are trying to keep our organization together. We do have a rainy-day fund so we won’t be broke if we have to eat some of the costs of this meeting, but we also would like the meeting to break even, even though we expect much-reduced attendance. Among other things, we don’t yet know for sure if we will be let out without penalty from our contract for $500,000+ with the hotel in Denver though we have good people working on this!

LSA’S INTERNAL DEMOCRACY: Professor Crawford complained that LSA’s 2500+ meeting attendees were not polled to determine how the meeting should proceed this year. Apart from the fact that such a poll would have taken more time than we had and that a poll of that many people is unlikely to produce a single clear result, we want to reiterate that the LSA is a democratic organization whose key decisions are made by elected leadership, as in fact this one was. LSA is guided by elected officers and an elected Board of Trustees, all of whom have a fiduciary duty to the Association to keep it on track and solvent. In fact, the LSA is one of the few professional associations that has annual contested elections for its leadership. Presidents and Secretaries serve for two years and Board members serve for three, and there is regular rotation of all positions. The nominations process for the leadership positions is open to nominations from the membership and members vote in elections that feature at least twice as many contestants as there are positions at stake so there is truly a robust contestation for positions. The elected leadership of the LSA has been responsible for these decisions about the annual meeting, and we urge all those who want to help guide the Association in the future to put themselves forward as candidates for election. LSA remains a democratically run Association, which is why we take criticism seriously. But it is also an Association in which an elected leadership has primary accountability to its membership and to the obligations we undertake as Board members to keep the Association afloat and operating. We hope that our decisions about the virtual meeting provide an opportunity for our whole LSA community to remain a vibrant, rambunctious and exciting intellectual home for all of us even if we cannot leave our physical homes to meet in person in Denver this year and therefore must wait for Chicago in 2021 and Lisbon in 2022.

So, we hope that the above provides a bit more context and explanation. We really do welcome all comments, criticisms questions and advice, even as we hope that our LSA friends understand we are all working remotely ourselves under less than ideal conditions, as everyone is these days. We hope to pull off the best LSA meeting we can under the circumstances and hope that we have established enough good will with everyone over the years that our LSA community will give us the benefit of the doubt as we try to organize our first-ever virtual conference. Because we will all be new at this, we cannot guarantee that there won’t be a few glitches as we learn along the way. But we hope that getting together virtually will remind us all of how much we can learn from each other and how much we enjoy seeing old friends and meeting new ones.

Best wishes,

Penny Andrews,

President, Law and Society Association

Kim Lane Scheppele

Immediate Past-President & Board Member, Law and Society Association

Jonathan Klaaren and Anna-Maria Marshall

Program Co-Chairs 2020, Law and Society Association

Comments

[anon]

Touché.

[anon]

Ummm....not so fast on the touché. This reads like:

1. We are giving full refunds, we swear.

2. We’ll have Zoom sessions! Some will be pre-recorded! You can hang out for 30 minutes after the session!

3. This is expensive – believe us!

4. This is not a series of video conferences – believe us!

5. You elected us – we’re above criticism!

[a friend]

I made the personal decision to cancel in light of the refusal to consider a discounted rate for virtual participation and the short timeframe for deciding (given lack of details until close to the refund deadline). THAT SAID, many of my colleagues are not cancelling, and I decided to make a donation on my own dime. Truly appreciate all of the efforts and consideration from all parties under very difficult circumstances.

[AnonProf]

I agree with the Touché -- this has to be devastating to them, and they're doing all they can to salvage the conference. The criticisms seem petty and inappropriate to me.

[Early career]

This is completely reasonable. As an early-career person for whom a conference this year specifically is quite valuable, I’m grateful LSA is putting in the effort and excited to attend. I’m confused by the complaining. The LSA conference fee is pretty small change in the scheme of things, is usually funded by participants’ schools anyway, and is being refunded on request.

[Chutzpah]

When will the law schools refund student tuition for the semester? Should students check the mailbox today, or will it take a few weeks?

[anon]

Off topic: but the FL seems to be avoiding, as usual, consideration of any topic that makes the left look bad.

Today, the Gov. of California basically laid out a plan to imprison seniors, under the guise of "supporting" and "protecting" them: by totally isolating them in their homes.

Disagree? Listen to the statement. I would love to hear the spin on this chilling, Orwellian implication.

Let's see a post about the liberty issues here.

Have we really come to the point where all you "liberal" professors can't even consider what is happening, in full view of your ever so astute, but comfortably enclaved noses?