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Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law

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  • Paul Caron

    Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law School Celebrates 57 Years of Greater Purpose at Annual Law Dinner

    Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law Celebrates 57 Years of Greater Purpose at Annual Law Dinner:

    Framed by Pepperdine’s “For Greater Purpose” theme, the Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law hosted its annual law dinner, one of its most prestigious convenings. On September 26, 2026, Caruso law faculty, administrators, alumni, students, and distinguished guests came together to celebrate the school’s 57th year and historic achievements over the past year. The evening featured remarks from Paul Caron, Duane and Kelly Roberts Dean and Professor of Law, and welcomed United States Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., for a discussion on a wide range of topics. …

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  • Paul Caron

    Justice Department Finds UCLA Law School Discriminates Based on Race in Admissions

    Press Release, Justice Department Finds UCLA Law School Discriminates Based on Race in Admissions:

    The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced today investigative findings that the University of California-Los Angeles School of Law (UCLA Law) discriminated against white and Asian students in granting admission to its 2023, 2024, and 2025 incoming classes. UCLA Law’s discriminatory conduct violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or color, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), which banned race discrimination in admissions.

    “Like many of its peer institutions, UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “The use of race as a thumb on the scale that helps or disadvantages any student is illegal. The Department will continue to enforce equal treatment under the law everywhere — including in our nation’s law schools.”

    The Department’s investigation found that post-SFFA, UCLA Law’s application includes personal statements and essay prompts, which are designed to elicit information about race. And UCLA Law’s admissions staff instructed prospective applicants how to reveal their race in these sections of the application—during race-based recruitment efforts, such as its annual “Diversity Admissions Open House”.

    The Department’s analysis revealed that UCLA Law rejected white and Asian applicants who had the same LSAT scores as admitted black and Hispanic applicants. Plainly, lower-scoring white and Asian applicants would have been admitted by UCLA Law if they were black or Hispanic. Further, in 2024 and 2025 (combined), half of the admitted black applicants had LSAT scores that were at or below 90% of the admitted white applicants.

    Letter From Harmeet K. Dhillon (Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice) to Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr (Oct. 1, 2026)

    Press coverage:

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  • Paul Caron

    Hemel: Ordinary Loss Harvesting — A Tax Shelter of Treasury’s Own Making

    Daniel J. Hemel (NYU), Ordinary Loss Harvesting: A Tax Shelter of Treasury’s Own Making, 192 Tax Notes Fed. 2191 (Sept. 21, 2026):

    Tax loss harvesting typically allows investors to generate capital losses that they can use to offset capital gains and up to $3,000 per year in ordinary income. A new type of tax-aware strategy — ordinary loss harvesting — offers high-net-worth investors a different, and quite extraordinary, opportunity: to generate ordinary losses that can offset potentially unlimited amounts of active business income.

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  • Paul Caron

    As ABA Awaits Dept. of Education Accreditation Decision, Legal Ed Ponders Its Future

    ABA Journal, As ABA Legal Ed council awaits Dept. of Education accreditation decision, educators consider future:

    U.S. Department of Education Under Secretary Nicholas Kent’s decision regarding the accreditor status of the council of the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar will come by year’s end, but legal education leaders are already preparing for what it might mean if the council is stripped of its powers.

    Last Thursday, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity voted not to make a recommendation regarding the council’s status as the sole national accreditor of law schools, a role it has held since 1952.

    That came after six-plus hours of heated debate the previous day as part of the accreditor’s ongoing five-year review process. The bipartisan panel was ultimately deadlocked and unable to come to an agreement on several different options. One recommended the council lose powers entirely, and two others proposed limiting the council’s powers until it provided documentation that it met department regulations requiring it be separate and independent from the overall ABA.

    Now, without a recommendation from the committee, Kent’s final determination will be made based on the transcripts from the committee hearing and an 86-page report from the Department of Education that recommended stripping the council of its national accreditor status. The council will be sending comments during the 10-day response period following the hearing.

    The committee’s unexpected deferral is itself an answer, says Kellye Testy, executive director and CEO of the Association of American Law Schools. While many legal educators held their breath during the hearings, expecting the council’s powers to be clawed back, “most people expect there to be a denial” once the under secretary weighs in.

    DeShawn Carter (J.D. 2027, UC-Berkeley), Reassessing the ABA’s Accreditation: Who Gets to Become a Lawyer?, 17 Calif. L. Rev. Online 160 (2026):

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  • Paul Caron

    IRS Revokes 71 Pieces of Tax Guidance; Tax Pros Wrangle With Treasury Rule Authority Post-Loper Bright

    Bloomberg Law, IRS Revokes 71 Pieces of Tax Guidance, Calling Them Obsolete:

    The IRS revoked 71 pieces of guidance that it says are obsolete as part of President Donald Trump’s push for deregulation.

    The revoked revenue rulings, revenue procedures, notices, and other documents “no longer provide useful information,” the IRS said in a notice Tuesday (Notice 2026-58). Clarifying that they are obsolete will streamline tax administration, reduce the volume of guidance that taxpayers and their advisers need to review, and increase clarity of the tax law, the agency said.

    The move follows Trump executive orders to eliminate guidance that is “overbearing and burdensome” and to repeal 10 existing regulations for each new one issued.

    The revoked pieces of guidance were issued as far back as 1954 and as recently as 2024. 

    Bloomberg Law, Tax Pros Wrangle With Treasury Rule Authority Post-Loper Bright:

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  • Sloan Speck

    Treasury Follows Through on “Too Good to Be True” ETF Tax Strategies

    In July, Treasury officials warned that they were scrutinizing a burgeoning category of tax-aware investment strategies. At the time, Treasury stopped short of issuing guidance. Well, the agency now has taken the “first concrete steps” to curtail these novel financial products.

    At the end of September, Treasury and the IRS released Notice 2026-62, a broad warning about potentially abusive investment-fund strategies, alongside Rev. Rul. 2026-20, which directly attacks an increasingly popular deployment of §351 to defer gain on appreciated securities through an exchange-traded fund, or ETF.

    Will these efforts put a damper on the “tax alpha” boom? Details and commentary, below the fold.

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  • Kevin R Johnson

    What Are the Toughest Law School Courses?

    This is what Microsoft Copilot had to say about the toughest law school courses:

    “Civil Procedure and Property Law are widely considered the toughest core courses in a law school curriculum, largely because they introduce abstract, technical rules with little to no prior real-world intuition. [1, 2]

    While a standard Juris Doctor (J.D.) curriculum across ABA-accredited schools shares the same foundational structure, specific subjects and upper-level electives consistently rank as the most grueling.

    The Toughest First-Year (1L) Classes

    First-year courses form the bedrock of the law school curriculum and act as an intense academic bootcamp. [1]

    • Civil Procedure: Focuses heavily on court jurisdiction, venue, pleading standards, and the intricate web of federal rules rather than everyday life concepts, making it hard to visualize. [1, 2]
    • Property Law: Blends archaic, centuries-old common law doctrines (like the dreaded Rule Against Perpetuities) with modern statutory schemes, requiring strict chronological fact analysis. [1, 2]
    • Constitutional Law: Demands high-level critical thinking to parse dense, shifting Supreme Court doctrines regarding government powers and individual rights. [1]

    The Most Difficult Upper-Level Electives

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  • Sloan Speck

    In Memoriam: Former Colorado Supreme Court Justice and ABA Legal Education Council Chair Melissa Hart

    With great sadness, I share news of the passing of former Colorado Supreme Court Justice Melissa Hart. Among Justice Hart’s many roles across the legal profession and academia, she was the Chair of the Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar for 2026–27, where she laid out a compelling and forward-thinking agenda in a time of exceptional uncertainty.

    Although I did not know Justice Hart well, I was fortunate to see her speak publicly a number of times over the last decade, and I very much appreciated her warm collegiality. Justice Hart was tireless in advancing her values, and she had a singular ability to inspire students, faculty, and members of the bar to bring that same commitment to their own work. Her work on access to justice influenced my own work on complementary issues in legal education. The state of Colorado and the nation will miss Justice Hart deeply.

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  • Sloan Speck

    Johannesen et al.: Does Global Financial Transparency Improve Tax Compliance in Developing Countries?

    Niels Johannesen (Oxford, Saïd Bus. Sch.), Lauge Larsen (Danish Ministry Tax’n) & Nadine Riedel (U. Münster, Inst. Pub. & Regional Econ.), Does Global Financial Transparency Improve Tax Compliance in Developing Countries?, CESifo Working Paper No. 12747 (June 2026):

    In a coordinated effort to curb tax evasion, governments systematically exchange information about bank accounts with foreign owners. We study the compliance effects of the policy in the context of South Africa using information reports on 1 million foreign bank accounts linked to income and audit data. We find that self-reported foreign income increased sharply and persistently at the onset of information exchange, but remained much below the true foreign income implied by the information reports [approximately half]. We explain the partial compliance response by showing that, contrary to standard theory of third-party reporting, the detection risk associated with non-compliance was modest.

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  • Kevin R Johnson

    18-year-old law school grad enrolls at Northwestern Law

    Paul Caron recently posted about a 18-year-old law school grad enrolling in Northwestern Law’s L.LM. program. The ABA Journal notes that

    “Jimmy Chilimigras won’t be able to buy alcohol for a few more years. But by then, he’ll have an LLM from the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law under his belt.

    According to a story published late last month in the Daily Northwestern, 18-year-old Chilimigras has enrolled at the Illinois law school to earn an LLM in taxation. Chilimigras, who graduated from the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law with a JD in May, said he was drawn to Northwestern University because of its small class sizes and its sense of community.”

    Minor students — especially when mixed in social settings with adults — create a number of issues for law school administrators. Should there be a minimum age limit for law school J.D. and L.LM. admissions?

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