I’m writing this post from San Diego, California, where I’ve just arrived for the Eleventh Annual Originalism Works in Progress Conference. (My co-author Steve Sachs and I will be presenting our work on The Misunderstood Eleventh Amendment, which we’ll be blogging about soon.) I’ve been to this conference for ten straight years and it is the best academic conference I attend, so I’ve been trying to reflect about why. Here are a few factors.

1. Of course it doesn’t hurt that it’s in San Diego in February. But I’ve been to lots of conferences that are just an excuse for a vacation, and this definitely isn’t one. Why?

2. The papers are selected by a competitive submission process, so they tend to be good. And yet it is also restricted to unpublished work, so discussion is still very valuable. This is probably the sweet spot for great academic conferences.

3. There is a core group of regular attendees, who take the intellectual content very seriously.

4. The papers and discussion are united by an intellectual interest in the original meaning of the Constitution (although many of the regular attendees are critics of originalism rather than self-described originalists). This means that the level of discussion tends to be very high. At the same time, very few constitutional law professors have this level of familiarity with both history and interpretive theory, so the conference facilitates a discussion that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

5. In other words, it’s one of the only conferences I’ve been to where we aren’t just asking the same questions all over again. Intellectual progress is made every year.

As I cut back on professional travel, this conference remains one of my highest priorities.