My Last TaxProf Blog Post

banner of a sunset over the coast, reading TaxProf Blog, Paul Caron, Dean, Pepperdine Caruso

TaxProf Blog has been a labor of love these past 21 years. I have been puzzling over when would be the right time to stop. Typepad, the platform on which TaxProf Blog is hosted, made the decision for me when it announced on August 27th that it will discontinue all blogs effective September 30th. At this stage in my life, I am not interested in starting anew on a different platform. I hope to find another home for the massive content of my 55,780 TaxProf Blog posts. If I do, I will post the link on this post before September 30th and notify the subscribers to my tax and legal education email lists.

I am proud of the role TaxProf Blog has played in the tax and legal education communities over the past 21 years. My boyhood dream was to be a sports reporter covering the Boston Red Sox on a daily basis for The Boston Globe (after it became obvious even to me that my dream of playing first base for the Red Sox would not pan out). My wife Courtney early on said the blog scratched that itch for me in academics rather than sports.

Before TaxProf Blog sunsets on September 30th, I would greatly appreciate it if readers who have enjoyed my tax, legal education, and/or faith coverage through the years would drop a short note in the comment section at the bottom of this post. When I eventually retire, I will cherish the memories of the time I spent writing this blog for over two decades in the hope that it enriched your lives just a little bit.

Paul

Update:

Brian Leiter (Chicago; Leiter Law School Reports), The Times They Are A Changin’…:

… and not just because democracy and the rule of law are ending in America! TaxProf Blog is shutting down. … Paul Caron’s blog was the only other law blog I read regularly (I occasionally look at Prawfs as well, but not as regularly). It’s a shame he’s retiring, but I understand his reasons! You can leave notes of appreciation on the Blog Emperor’s final post.

Glenn Reynolds (Tennessee; Instapundit), HE’LL BE MISSED: Paul Caron: My Last TaxProf Blog Post.:

[T]hanks, Paul, for the great contribution you’ve made for all these years. You’ve done a lot for a lot of people, and not just in the tax world.

Josh Blackburn (South Texas), Farewell to the TaxProfBlog:

Blogging can be a thankless and burdensome task. We should all be grateful for Dean Paul Caron’s many years of service.

In 2011, while clerking on the Sixth Circuit, I entered the academic job market. At the time, I checked Paul Caron’s TaxProfBlog regularly. Paul compiled information about VAPs, fellowships, and other aspects of academia. I reached out to Paul, and asked if he would meet. He graciously agreed!

I’ll never forget the meeting. We caught up at a Starbucks near the campus of the University of Cincinnati. Who walks in, but the former mayor of Cincy: Jerry Springer. Yes, that Jerry Springer. Paul offered some invaluable advice about the academic market and how to approach the meat market. And Jerry offered some useful advice of how to handle conflicts at faculty meetings. (Okay, I made up the last point, but it would be hilarious to see Jerry manage a hiring meeting.)

Since then, I have been fortunate to keep Paul in my circle of contacts. I still read his blog daily, and often will email him about certain items he may wish to cover. Paul’s output is staggering. He has published more than 55,000 posts, on top of his full-time job as a Dean! Paul also answers emails at all hours of the day, a remarkable feat. He doesn’t miss a thing.

Alas, all good things come to an end. In 2023, I offered a requiem for SCOTUSBlog, which seemed destined to drift away, though thanks to a bizarre turn of events, it is not being bolstered by The Dispatch. But now, a pillar of the legal blogosphere will draw to a close. TypePad, the once-popular blogging software, is shutting down at the end of September. Paul has announced that he is shutting down TaxProfBlog. I will preserve his final post since the current page will soon vanish. …

Blogging can be a thankless and burdensome task. We don’t earn any actual income for doing it, and receive countless attacks from people who may never write any publicly. Indeed, social media for better or worse, has supplanted much of what made the legal blogosphere so important. I started blogging in the Fall of 2009, and still enjoy the process. But I do not write nearly as much as I used to, and I see diminishing returns.

We should all be grateful for Dean Paul Caron’s many year or service. No one will replace him.

Steven Chung (Tax Attorney, Los Angeles), Goodbye To A Blogging Pioneer: Reflecting On The TaxProf Blog’s Legacy In A Changing Internet Era And Its Influence On One Tax Attorney:

Although many blogs [have] appeared on the net, most lasted only a short time before the number of posts faded and bloggers eventually shut them down or abandoned them. Only a few achieved consistent notability. One of them was the TaxProf blog, which Paul Caron — the current dean of Pepperdine Caruso School of Law — ran. While the blog catered to the tax and law school community, it stood out for its consistent release of relevant news alongside the occasional personal or religious post. If news appeared on the TaxProf Blog, it deserved a read.

On Monday, Caron announced that after 21 years and 55,780 posts, he would end the blog. He made the decision after learning that the platform hosting his blog would discontinue all blogs on September 30.

I think I first came across the TaxProf blog when I was a tax LLM student at Chapman School of Law. I was visiting the late Michael Lang during his office hours and I happened to notice the blog on his computer monitor. From that moment, I visited the TaxProf blog regularly. …

I will miss the TaxProf Blog not just for the influence it had on me, but also because it represents one of a dying breed of blogs created as a “labor of love,” as Caron puts it. Blogs have given way to social media. Bloggers have morphed into influencers who care more about pleasing monetization algorithms, boosting view counts, or gaining followers. And commentators write in ways designed to troll or provoke reactions, rather than to make people think.

I am hopeful that algorithms of the future will put an end to clout chasing and reward those who provide useful information like the TaxProf Blog did for 21 years.

Law.com, Eulogy to a Blog: Paul Caron Ends TaxProf Blog:

On Monday morning, Paul Caron, creator of TaxProf blog, uploaded post number 55,782—his last one after posting daily for over 21 years. …

Paul Caron has been what I call an anchor-person dean,” Danielle M. Conway, dean and Donald J. Farage Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law, told Law.com. “He has always been available to other deans, and the blog post is the embodiment of that availability.” He does the research and curation to provide information to people who are in decision-making positions, Conway said, but he also teaches everyone about what is happening in legal education, pulling from public documents that he summarizes in a transparent way. …

Caron made the tough decision to end his blogging legacy that has brought him fame—sans fortune—verifiable by having received over 200 million page views over the past two decades.

It’s one of the few “email blasts” William Brewbaker III, dean and professor of law at the University of Alabama School of Law, said he has allowed in his inbox, adding, “I’m not aware of anything else quite like it.” He referred to Caron’s blog as “a ‘one-stop shop’ for news and commentary about things law professors and deans need to keep up with…. Paul’s own voice is also evident in the blog—the tax professor, the person of faith, the advocate for his beloved Pepperdine Law School,” Brewbaker added.

Michael Graetz, Justus S. Hotchkiss Professor Emeritus of Law and Professorial Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, told Law.com that he was “surprised—and impressed—”that Caron was able to continue it for so long given the responsibilities he had taken on as dean of Pepperdine. … Paul’s blog has been a great service to tax professors, filled with useful information that otherwise would have been missed,” Graetz said. “He provided an extraordinary service for many years—one not easily replaced.”

“This is truly the end of an era,” Ruth Mason, Edwin S. Cohen Distinguished Professor of Law and Taxation at the University of Virginia School of Law, told Law.com. “For at least two decades, Paul Caron’s blog has been the source for news about tax legal academia.” “I will miss the blog, and I’m grateful to Paul for providing this service to the tax community,” she added.

“Paul is really an extraordinary guy in every aspect—as a dean, professor and scholar, which he has brought to the blog as a communicator of knowledge and information and insight across academia and even into practice,” Robert Ahdieh, dean and Anthony G. Buzbee Endowed Dean’s Chair at Texas A&M University School of Law, told Law.com, who also referred to Caron as “self-effacing, gracious and modest.” …

“Paul Caron’s blog has been invaluable in legal education,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, told Law.com. “At a time when everything seems increasingly partisan, his blog was a neutral source of essential information for legal educators,” adding that he realized it was a “huge amount of work for him, but it was tremendously beneficial to all of us who learned by reading it.” …

Caron said that he has always done most of the blog work on weekends, so “I would often tell my wife and children that I couldn’t do something because I needed to ‘feed the beast,’” but “now that the beast is no more, I am looking forward to traveling more with my wife, including visiting our now adult children in Madison and Palo Alto.”

Reuters, Groundbreaking Law Blog Calls It Quits After 21 Years:

The 21-year-old TaxProf Blog founder and Pepperdine Law Dean Paul Caron announced on his soon-to-be defunct blog. …

TaxProf Blog was an influential early entrant in the constellation of law professor blogs that flourished in the mid-2000s through the 2010s, before social media sites such as Twitter (now X) chipped away at their dominance. But TaxProf Blog remained relevant as others faded, serving as a digital water cooler for all of U.S. legal education.

In addition to posts on tax law [and legal education] … Caron threw in a smattering of posts on religion. “It is a big loss for us,” Boston University law dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig wrote in one of dozens of comments on Caron’s farewell post. “To us in the legal academy, your blog was like day-to-day reporting of the sport of legal education.” …

ABA Journal, Blogging Law Professors Consider Their Options After Web Host Shutdown; At Least One Is Calling It Quits:

The end-of-the-month shutdown of web hosting platform Typepad has blogging law professors scrambling to find a replacement or considering whether to shut down.

At least one legal educator has already made the decision to retire from blogging. He is Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law dean Paul Caron, co-founder of the Law Professor Blogs Network, which is closing with Typepad’s demise. …

Caron informed members of the Law Professors Blog Network about the shutdown this week. He offered a tech support engineer to help transitioning to LexBlog, which has offered to host the law blogs.

“It has been an honor to serve as your ‘Blog Emperor’ through this remarkable chapter in self-publishing, the evolution of the internet, and legal education in America,” Caron wrote in his notice to members. “Thanks for your partnership all these years.”