SEAL News: July 21, 2009 – Message to SEAL Members from J.B. Ruhl, SEAL President
Dear Fellow SEAL Member:
It is with great pleasure that I assume the post of President of the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law. My predecessors, Owen Jones and Jeff Stake, have built SEAL into an intellectual home for an impressive multi-national and pan-disciplinary collection of scholars. It is an honor to follow in their footsteps and I will do my very best to continue SEAL’s progress.
Before offering a quick update of SEAL happenings, let me first ask all SEAL members to extend their appreciation to Jeff Stake for the wonderful work he has done in this post for the past two years. Jeff worked tirelessly to deliver two excellent conferences, to initiate our Board of Advisors, and to begin the groundwork for a SEAL blog. As anyone who knows Jeff knows, there is much more I could say about his invaluable contributions. Many thanks, Jeff!
For those of you who were unable to attend SEAL’s 10th Scholarship Conference at Vanderbilt University Law School in April 2009, you were missed. It was a tremendously successful event with a record number of speakers and participants from around the U.S. as well as from other nations. Planning has begun on our 11th conference, tentatively slated for the spring of 2010 with details to follow at summer’s end.
We continue to work to expand SEAL’s membership and scope of reach. We will be in touch with law school faculty, law reviews, and Law & Science student organizations, and have placed an ad in Jurimetrics: The Journal of Law, Science, and Technology. If you have other thoughts about groups we might contact and other venues in which to promote SEAL, please let me know.
I have been impressed with how much SEAL accomplishes with modest financial resources. Naturally, we could do more of the former with more of the latter. If anyone has ideas about potential grants and other funding sources, please let me know. And, of course, we appreciate our dues paying members and encourage them to stay current.
SEAL is on such solid footing after Owen’s and Jeff’s tenures, it would be foolish of anyone to chart a much different path. I do hope, given my particular interest in complex adaptive systems theory, to make SEAL more prominent in that community of scholars. Beyond that, I am focused for the time being on ensuring that the momentum we have on many other fronts is not slowed. I also welcome input and ideas from all members for how SEAL can grow stronger. Please be sure to check out the website, www.sealsite.org, and offer recommendations for additions to our literature lists and other resources.
I truly appreciate the privilege of serving SEAL in this capacity and hope this message finds you well.
All best,
J.B.
J.B. Ruhl
Matthews & Hawkins Professor of Property
Florida State University College of Law
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1601
(850) 644-1596 (phone)
(850) 644-0576 (fax)
e-mail: jruhl@law.fsu.edu
FSU page: http://www.law.fsu.edu/faculty/jruhl.html
SSRN page: http://ssrn.com/author=178128
BEPress Page: http://works.bepress.com/j_b_ruhl/
Blog: http://jurisdynamics.blogspot.com