Why Read When You Can Watch?

In what I suspect may be a new format for promoting international law conferences, Widener University’s School of Law has put together an hour and a half streaming video with highlights from last year’s 2 day conference, Envisioning a More Democratic Global System. The Conference was co-sponsored by the American Society of International Law and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. It examined (and critiqued) the ideas put forward by Richard Falk and Widener’s own Andy Strauss for establishing a Global Parliament to address some of the “democracy deficit” in the current international legal order. The Conference included presentations by Falk, Strauss, David Kennedy, Thomas Franck, Gregory Fox, Robert Johansen, Leila Sadat and a wide range of foreign scholars and government officials.

Regardless of your interest in the Global Parliament idea, I wonder what readers think of the format? Should we applaud efforts like this to make scholarly symposia accessible beyond the few dozen scholars and students who attend your average conference? Will (or should) on-line videos supplant the standard law review “symposium” issue? Or, might they simply compliment the existing scholarly output from such meetings?