As Brian Leiter polls faculty on seven ways to improve the AALS Annual Meeting, Tax Prof Bridget Crawford offers a different suggestion: a Profs Date service:
I see a business opportunity in the legal academy. What if there was a “profs date” database (a la J-Date, Match, eHarmony, etc.) that was conference-specific? Attendees of the AALS Annual Meeting, for example, could register with the service to indicate to their target audience an interest and availability for a few dates, flirtation, whatever.
There would have to be some sort of certification process — no registering unless you are legally single or divorced, morally available, etc. The system would facilitate initial communication between the professors and after that, it would be up to them.
Now THAT is a conference add-on that might increase attendance.
For more, see
- Chronicle of Higher Education, Sex and the Conference
- Huffington Post, Conference Sex, or What Professors Get Up to at Holiday Time
- Inside Higher Ed, "Tricks of the Trade"
See also this paper on SSRN: Swinger Economics. Here is the abstract:
Swinging is a sexual behavior of increasing relevance but substantially ignored in theoretical economic investigation. This paper has two major goals. The first is to describe what swinging is, discuss its economic relevance and single out the main characteristics of swinger behavior. To this end, the Italian situation has been considered as a type of case study. The second goal is to use standard and less-standard tools from economic theory to propose some preliminary assessments of the causes and consequences of swinger couples’ behavior. In this respect, some contributions on two-sided markets, hedonic adaptation approaches and equilibrium matching models have proved particularly useful.
(Hat Tip: Kim Krawiec.) The author's purported name and academic affiliation appear dubious — Fabio D'Orlando (University of Cassino and Cream Economic Center) — and The Perfect Substitute notes "I was so convinced that this was a pen name that I googled the author's name, and came across another paper of his on the pornography market, complete with empirical data."
