You are right, of course, but I hate it so much to have "LOGGER" everywhere, seems to me that it is shouting at me.... Maybe we shouldn't put the logger static, I don't think it does anything anyway... BTW, we are not doing static logger elsewhere because of this: http://slf4j.org/faq.html#declared_static
Of course, this is as long as it doesn't cost any resource (in domain object they should be static).