As we now proudly proclaim in our ASIL propaganda, there really is “nothing else in the world” quite like our annual meeting. Where else can anyone find a gathering of over one thousand international lawyers and academics trolling for insight (and connections) among more than 28 panels and numerous academic publishers? Where else is there a comparable gathering of powerful politicians, prominent practitioners, Beltway insiders, eminent judges and arbitrators, and executive branch officials – all happily mingling -- amongst bottomless coffee urns -- with eager, aggressively young law students and nerdy academics that only fellow nerds have ever heard of?

By my calculation, this will be my 25th annual meeting. It remains the intellectually rich smorgasbord that it always has been. Admittedly, I’ve come some way since the days when I snuck into the back of an enormous ballroom at the Mayflower Hotel during a lunch hour, State Department badge still around my neck, straining to hear nuggets of wisdom from a distant podium consisting of four extremely prominent talking heads. (These days I am less likely to be quietly absorbing the embarrassment of riches on hand than attending to some last minute administrative crisis or assuaging the injured feelings of SOMEBODY VERY IMPORTANT whose name or institutional affiliation we have inexplicably gotten wrong on our (exorbitantly expensive) final programs.)

It is easy to see the continuities from one annual meeting to the next. Although our Society has gotten more cosmopolitan in its membership and more sensitive to the need for broad inclusion, some (reassuring or annoying) names and faces appear regularly on the program year after year. With some exceptions (such as the unforgettable (and exhausting) year that the “crit” organizers marched us through panels from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.), most annual meetings are structurally similar – opening keynote, daily panels from about 9 to 5, followed by pleasant receptions/enervating general meeting/boring Presidential speech/interminable dinner banquet/sleepy-eyed Saturday morning panels/rush to airport. And truth to tell, some of the presentations on offer are more likely to reflect the speakers’ predictable predilections than the real world – but then, the acidic hallway postmortems make even these worthwhile. Many of the great debates of a quarter century ago are eerily similar to those today – and sometimes, if you close your eyes, you can imagine yesterday’s antagonists standing in the shoes of today’s. Old timers like me can be excused the occasional feelings of déjà vu. Were the arguments by the defenders and opponents of the ICJ’s Nicaragua decision really all that different from those who now defend or oppose Operation Iraqi Freedom? Can it be possible that we are still debating the merits of the Law of the Sea Convention or whether customary international law insists on compensation for measures that are “tantamount to expropriation”? Can we possibly still be trying to “balance” the rights and responsibilities of multinational corporations and of the host states in which they operate?

And yet, as a Society insider, I now know that beneath the surface similarities, annual meetings vary a great deal from year to year, and not merely because of theme or hotel venue. I know, for example, that this year’s annual meeting is the product of an unusual attempt at ground-up democracy in place of top-down committee dominance. This year’s hard working annual meeting committee, led by co-chairs Chantal Thomas, Charles Hunnicutt, and William Aceves, opted to encourage panel proposals from the entire membership, and not merely the Society’s interest groups. Their open call for ideas for panels and for panelists succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations and yielded some 80 proposals – all in competition for the 28 slots dictated by economics and available hotel space. While I have no illusions that the result will elicit fewer complaints from those whose ideas were not selected than in the past, this year’s meeting has a more solid claim to democratic representation than in years past.

I am looking forward to what our members and invited luminaries will have to tell us about “The Future of International Law.” I am looking forward to Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz’s critique of the international economic order (and incidentally of international financial institutions) – and hearing how Rachel Kyte, of the International Financial Corporation, responds, during the opening Grotius lecture. I suspect many of Stiglitz’s themes will also emerge in the rich set of panels on offer dealing with economic law -- on the WTO’s Doha Round, migration and trade, private international law, teaching and research in the field, transnational litigation in U.S. courts, the UN Sale of Goods Convention, investment arbitration, and general counsels’ views of the impact of international law on multinational corporations. I also suspect that Hudson medal winner and international law legend, Andreas Lowenfeld will canvass all of this and much else in the course of his interview by another legend, Yale Dean Harold Koh.

As appropriate in a year that an Oscar went to “An Inconvenient Truth,” the opening environmental law panel will consider whether international dispute settlers will have a role in dealing with the climate change problem, while related panels will consider whether lawyers are ready for future natural calamities such as tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, and asteroids, or man-made degradations of the earth’s natural resources. The future of international security will be the subject of a kaleidoscopic speech at the annual dinner by the author of The Shield of Achilles and the forthcoming Terror and Consent, Philip Bobbitt, as well as panels on the role of the U.S. Supreme Court in the war on terror, the security of the U.S.-Canadian border, the nuclear non-proliferation regime, and the interplay between counter-insurgents and terrorists. The future of development will be addressed by experts from academe and practice addressing international health law, food, internet governance, as well as ownership issues arising from traditional knowledge and genetic resources. In addition, two panels, including one of two featuring young scholars who responded to the Society’s call for papers, will be addressing transformative legal projects underway on the African continent. The future of international legal theory will be represented by an all-star plenary panel on the theme of the conference one evening at Georgetown as well as by panels addressing identity politics (a panel on “queer” theory, a roundtable on citizenship), the rule of law, the ethics of lawyering, democracy and gender, and non/sub-state actors and transnational governance. Those seeking more hands-on or practical insights will be able to turn to presentations on the transnational efforts of U.S. law schools, the use of technology in law school teaching and scholarship, early morning interest group meetings, or a panel on the internationalization of international law societies. The future of human rights will be addressed in panels addressing post-Sosa developments in U.S. courts, social justice advocacy, the legacies and current realities of slavery, human rights institutional reform efforts, alternative judicial venues for transitional justice efforts, and the prospects for international labor law.

And those not satisfied with spending two and half days on these matters can expand their intellectual horizons for an entire week in Washington, D.C, thanks to a number of other events scheduled to coincide with the ASIL’s annual meeting. These include two days of panels commemorating the 25th anniversary of the International Legal Studies Program at American University, a day long joint program by the ASIL and George Washington University on Intellectual Property Rights in India and China, a day long program co-sponsored by the ASIL and the World Bank Administrative Tribunal on International Administrative Tribunals and the Rule of Law, a book launch co-sponsored by the ASIL and the United Institute for Peace (to celebrate Council Unbound: The Growth of UN Decision Making on Conflict and Post-Conflict Issues after the Cold War, by Michael J. Matheson), or the 4th annual Institute for Transnational Arbitration/ASIL half day conference on The Future of Arbitration Involving States immediately preceding the annual meeting on Wednesday, Mar. 28th. (For details on all of these programs as well as a regularly updated program of the ASIL annual meeting, check asil.org.).

Although this year’s annual meeting includes at least one panel that promises a historical perspective – a retrospective on the 1907 Hague Convention and the 1977 Geneva Protocols – its distinct promise lies in the attempt to look forward to the Society’s second century -- and not merely in remembering things past.

Those who have examined how former societies have thrived or failed and speculated on the reasons have distilled historical lessons. At the end of a depressing examination of the environmental catastrophes that, in his view, partly explain the collapse of numerous prominent civilizations, best selling author Jared Diamond (in Collapse (2005)) finds “reasons to hope” that today’s societies – including our own – are not necessarily doomed to comparable sudden demise immediately following the height of their power. Diamond argues that despite ominous parallels between prior cases of collapse and our own society, there is one promising difference. Thanks to modern technology and the ability to rapidly access the world’s diverse talents to address our problems, today we have the power to learn lessons from the past that was denied to many ancient civilizations. We now have the ability to avoid disastrous forms of “group” or “crowd” think characterized by a premature sense of ostensible unanimity, suppression of personal doubts or the expression of contrary views. Diamond argues that the very forces that threaten us – the global inter-connectedness that exposes us to terrorists from Afghanistan or climate change – also permit us to know what is happening on the other side of the world in a way that was impossible for the Classic Maya or Mycenaean Greece 2000 years before them. The instantaneous communications and porous borders that pose grave security threats enable us to learn of and from the challenges societies across the world face. We are now empowered as few before us have been to learn from them and to hear the views of those who are very different from us.

Diamond’s book suggests that all it takes to avoid collapse is the ability to listen, an open mind, and a readiness to accept guidance from a variety of disciplines. The Society’s annual meeting is one place where that global interdisciplinary learning that gives Diamond hope can take place.

It is a perfect place to examine “The Future of International Law.”