First and somewhat belatedly, I want to welcome Brad Smith to the DoL fold. Brad is my friend and colleague at Capital University (he's in the law school) and as regular readers know is John McCain's favorite former Federal Election Commissioner.

Re: Brad's questioning of the value of academic conferences. The only value of the conferences is in the networking. There never was much point to the paper sessions even less so in this internet age. But you still can't network effectively by the internet. I was drinking networking until the wee hours of the morning in fact.