For the first panel, Crimmigration: At the Intersection of Criminal and Immigration Law, Kittrie remarks were entitled “View from the Crimmigration Front Lines: Arizona.” He noted that the panel was being held on the first anniversary of passage of Arizona's employer sanctions law, which went into effect in January 2008, and is considered the harshest in the nation. Kittrie discussed both the law's impact on the people of Arizona and the challenges to the constitutionality of the law, which has thus far been upheld by both the U.S. District Court for Arizona and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, meaning variants of the law could be on their way to other states next. Kittrie noted that Arizona is also an important case study because Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano has been nominated to be the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Kittrie proceeded to discuss Napolitano's immigration-related record in Arizona and what insights it may provide into how she will serve as head of the department that oversees much of the U.S.'s vast immigration bureaucracy.
Kittrie also spoke on a panel entitled "Interdisciplinary Legal Scholarship, the Demography of the Legal Academy, and the Future of Straddling the Academic-Professional Divide." That panel consisted of seven invited leading legal scholars, including Kittrie, responding to the thesis that interdisciplinary studies, and support for legal scholarship more broadly, may be a bad idea for other than a few elite law schools. Professor Kittrie, in his response, disagreed with the thesis that support for legal scholarship is a bad idea, but called for the production of more practically useful legal scholarship. Kittrie stated that "from the perspective of value to the students in the classroom, who after all are there to learn to solve practical problems for their clients, if their professors are going to spend time on writing, the students are better off the more professors write things that keep them in touch with the skill of solving practical problems, and therefore hone the professors' capacity to convey that skill to their students." Following the panel, Kittrie was elected Treasurer of the AALS Section on Scholarship.