Last week I was at the Ohio Judicial Conference to give my annual presentation on the most important cases from the Supreme Court of Ohio this past year.  I attended Chief Justice O’Connor’s annual State of the Judiciary Address, which you can watch here. Most of the speech was a recapitulation of and progress report on the Chief’s eight point plan to strengthen judicial elections in Ohio, which she rolled out at the annual convention of the Ohio State Bar Association in May.  You can read more about that on this blog post. You can also learn more at www.OhioCourts2013.org.

Because it was the 50th anniversary of the Ohio Judicial Conference, there was a fascinating panel on Reflections on the Past, Looking to the Future.  Panelists discussed significant events from the past fifty years and the impact of these events for the future.  The members of the panel were  Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor and Justice Paul Pfeifer of the Supreme Court of Ohio, Judge Pat Fischer of the First District Court of Appeals, Retired Judge Roger Wilson of the Champaign County Court of Common Pleas, Professor Ned Foley of the OSU Law School, and one of the  contributors to an outstanding blog on election law, Stuart Forsyth, the Legal Futurist, Jonathan Hollingsworth, President of the Ohio State Bar Association, Carol Luper, Reporter, ABC6 and Fox 28 news, William Frederick Meinecke, Jr., Historian, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Ohio State Senator Bill Seitz.  The panel was expertly moderated by Professor Arthur R. Miller of NYU in the style he used on his award-winning Fred Friendly seminars on PBS. It was both thought provoking and fun.

Now back to school to teach torts!