SOURCEAssociation of American Law SchoolsDavid A

Thisprogram will occur on Friday, January 9, from 3:30 - 5:15 p.m. at the SanDiego Marriott and Marina.Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles is a program sponsored by the AALSSection on Admiralty and Maritime Law and co-sponsored by the AALS Sections onInternational Law and National Security Law. This panel will discussinternational, regional, and unilateral measures to enhance maritime securitysince 2001 (such as the Proliferation Security Initiative, the U.S. ContainerSecurity Initiative, Australia's Maritime Identification System, and anti-piracy proposals before the United Nations) and any tension that these maygenerate with established maritime rules and regimes. This program will occuron Thursday, January 8, from 10:30 a.m - 12:15 p.m.

at the San Diego Marriottand Marina.The entire AALS 2009 Annual Meeting program can be found on theAssociation's Web site at Members of the press areinvited to attend free of charge. Those interested in attending are asked tonotify Deborah Quick from January 6-10, 2009 at 619-645-6955. Press also mayregister on-site at the AALS office located in the Manchester Room on theNorth Tower/Lobby Level of the San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina beginningTuesday after 6 p.m.January 6, 2009, and continuing through Saturday, January10, 2009.The Association of American Law Schools is a resource for the improvementof the quality of legal education by networking law school faculty,professional staff and deans to information and resources. AALS is theprincipal representative of legal education to the federal government, othernational higher education organizations, learned societies and internationallaw schools.SOURCEAssociation of American Law SchoolsDavid A. Brennen of the Association of American Law Schools, 1- 619-645-6955(January 6-10, 2009). Panel Presentations to Focus on Religious Freedom, the Financial Crisis, Post-Racialism and Proposition 8SAN DIEGO, Jan.

5 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ The Association of AmericanLaw Schools (AALS) has announced four programs devoted to late-breaking legalissues. These "hot topics" programs will take place Thursday and Friday,January 8-9, 2009 in San Diego. The purpose of these special "hot topics"programs is to provide a forum for panel presentations on timely and importantlegal issues of general interest that arose after April 2008. The programswere selected by members of the AALS Executive Committee from many proposalssubmitted by faculty at AALS member law schools.The first Hot Topic, Pulpit Freedom:On Taxes, Elections, And ReligiousFreedom, is about the relationship between church and state in the context ofpolitical campaigning.The panelists for this program will discuss theAlliance Defense Fund's organized effort during the 2008 Presidential electioncampaign to challenge the extent to which pastors, rabbis, imams, and otherreligious leaders speaking to their congregations should be able to expressviews about candidates for public office.The second Hot Topic, The Financial Crisis, will feature a discussion ofthe causes, short-term solutions, and longer-term implications of the currentfinancial crisis. The panelists for this program will examine the financialcrisis on a retail level; the securitization of home mortgages and thedevelopment of derivatives that contributed to the crisis; the role of largefinancial conglomerates and the failure of the various regulators (especiallythe OCC, the OTS, the Fed and the SEC) to control the risk-taking of thoseconglomerates; and the extent to which the crisis, with its broadinternational repercussions, has prompted coordinated and/or harmonizedresponses among affected states and whether this may lead to expandedregulatory cooperation in the future.The third Hot Topic, What's Race Got To Do With Post Racialism, proposesto examine post-racialism as both an idea and a political practice through theconvergence of four issues: (1) the election of the first Black President ofthe United States, (2) the passage of Nebraska's anti-affirmative actioninitiative and Colorado's rejection of a similar measure, (3) the financialmeltdown and the attendant rhetoric about "under-qualified" minority borrowersas at least one source of the crisis and (4) the recent controversy overUniversity of California admissions in which a member of UCLA's undergraduateadmissions committee resigned to protest alleged violations of Proposition209's ban on racial preferences in admitting black students.