Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
The Yale Undergraduate Law Journal: On this episode of Amicus host Joel Vincent speaks with a first generation college student and incoming 1L at Harvard Law School. She is a self-described law school content creator and admissions advisor. Articulate and thoughtful, Rose goes into minute detail on her law school application process. The intensity of her devotion to analyzing the admissions process was most impressive — and scary! It made me feel very lucky that I got into law school anywhere.
George Mason University has named Daniel B. Kelly the next dean of the Antonin Scalia Law School, effective June 25, 2026. Kelly currently serves as dean of the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Prior to that role, he spent 15 years on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame, where he served as director of the Law School’s Program on Law and Economics and founding director of the university’s Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate
This proposal—to impose sales tax on digital advertising—straddles the categories of subnational data taxes and gross-revenue digital services taxes. At present, Maryland, Utah, and Washington have sales taxes that expressly reach the sale of these advertising services. A report from the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, below the fold.
Read MoreWe are in the teaching business and constantly think about how to best teach our students. We also live in a time of political polarization. With that in mind, this piece in The Conversation caught my eye. The bottom line:
“Beyond [the] evidence of political polarization, . . . there’s another, less divisive reality. Ask people to name their best teacher, and regardless of their political affiliation, they will likely offer a similar answer. Most people will say that they learned a lot from a teacher who knew them, cared about them and made learning relevant to their lives.” (bold added).
University of Arkansas- Fayetteville Provost Indrajeet Chaubey announced the appointment of Katheleen Guzman to serve as Interim Dean, effective July 1st. Guzman will serve a two-year term through June 30, 2028, providing leadership continuity as the university prepares to conduct a national search for a permanent dean. Guzman’s ties to the institution run deep: she is a graduate of the law school, and her father, Ray Guzman, served on its faculty for many years. Fayetteville has had interim leadership since 2022.
This week, Noah H. Marks (UNC) reviews a new article by Sarah B. Lawsky (Illinois), Limiting Inconsistencies in Legal Languages, 28 Vanderbilt J. Ent. & Tech. L. 765 (2026).
Tax practitioners, professors, and students are all too aware that the Code, despite its interconnectedness and intricacies, is far from a logically consistent, unified whole. Overlapping provisions and statutory gaps reflect the Code’s human authorship, and IRS guidance and glosses from Treasury Regulations, informal guidance, and Forms and Instructions resolve some of those issues, while exacerbating (and even introducing) others.
Read MoreDue out June 9, this upbeat tome from former State Senator and co-founder of The States Project, Daniel Squadron, enourages legal reformers to focus on state governments as the most fertile source of progressive change as we head into our next 250 years. I’m curious how Squadron feels even the most savvy state can achieve victories in the face of a hostile Washington. Let’s check it out and see. Plus, who knew Sarah Jessica Parker loved state government?
Jesse Drucker & Dyland Freedman, Trump Clears Way for Corporate Tax Dodge Hidden in the Fine Print (New York Times, May 29, 2026)
A year ago, the Trump administration withdrew from a global effort to curb offshore tax-dodging by multinational companies. That decision has been a huge gift to corporate America, enabling companies to avoid at least $40 billion in income taxes since the beginning of 2025.
A New York Times review of securities filings from nearly 500 companies showed that they avoided taxes by attributing hundreds of billions of dollars in earnings to low- or no-tax foreign locales like Cyprus, Bermuda, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Often, corporations funneled the profits through subsidiaries in places where they had no employees, offices or customers.
Tax havens became more appealing after President Trump signed an order on his first day back in office withdrawing the United States from a 13-year international effort to end such schemes. The effort led to dozens of countries imposing a minimum corporate tax and rules for pursuing companies using tax havens. After House Republicans passed legislation last year targeting some of those countries with a new tax, international officials agreed to exempt U.S. companies from much of the crackdown.
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In a forthcoming article in the Journal of Legal Education, St John’s Professor Ashley B. Armstrong offers a systematic approach to what has long been understood as a gap in traditional law school courses. Presenting what she calls “the contextual case method”, Professor Armstrong doesn’t merely highlight the importance of expanding case analysis to include the context that led to the dispute and the concrete impact on the parties and society of the court’s opinion. She charts a three part course helping faculty incorporate context into our classrooms. She proposes we (1) interrogate judicial opinions as constructed narratives; (2) supplement court opinions by assigning texts to problematize and expand students’ understanding; and (3) teach cases “to their end” by uncovering what happened after a decision was handed down. Sounds good to me.
.Armstrong, Ashley B., The Stories We (Don’t) Teach (February 01, 2026). St. John’s Legal Studies Research Paper No. 26-0007, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6570520 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6570520
Kimberley A. Strassel, The GOP Wants to Tax Your Car (Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2026)
Campaign slogans can be catchy, clumsy or clever. Few are as crazy as the one Republicans are setting themselves up for this fall: “Vote GOP. The party that brought you a national car tax.”
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee laid the groundwork last week in passing a five-year reauthorization of transportation programs. Greedy for more “infrastructure” dollars to shower on home states in a midterm and unwilling to raise the gasoline tax, Republicans conjured up a new revenue stream: the first-ever federal “annual registration fee” for vehicles. How bad is this policy, and how big a political trap? All but one committee Democrat voted for the bill—with unrestrained glee.
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