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Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law

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  • Paul Caron

    The Impact of the Decline of Christianity in the Northeast and Its Rise in the South

    Dispatch Faith: Why American Christianity Became Southern, by Daniel K. Williams (Ashland University; Author, Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship (2021)):

    In the Deep South, more than half of adults regularly attend church, but in the Northeast, more than half never attend. The two regions seem to be mirror opposites of each other when it comes to church.

    But this is a recent phenomenon. For most of American history, the Northeast—the land of the Puritans and the center of many of the revivals of the First and Second Great Awakenings—was a heavily churched region. According to Gallup polls, 69 percent of those in the northeast corridor (a region extending from Maryland to Maine) identified as church members in 1998-2000, compared to 74 percent of those in the South. But 20 years later, Gallup polls showed a 14 percentage-point difference between the regions. Only 44 percent of respondents in the Northeast claimed to be church members, compared to 58 percent of those in the South.

    In other words, as hard as it may be to believe, in the late 1990s, northeastern states such as Massachusetts and New York had higher rates of church affiliation than Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee do today.

    The rapid decline in church membership across the nation, along with the concomitant rise of the “nones,” has been the subject of numerous news articles, along with anxious handwringing in Christian circles. But far less attention has been paid either to the causes or effects of the recent southernization of American religion. Why has the South remained mostly religious while the Northeast has seen a huge decline in church affiliation—and what does this mean for the future of American politics and American Christianity? …

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  • Paul Caron

    Projected 2027-28 U.S. News Law School Rankings: First-Time Bar Passage

    In the current 2026-27 U.S. News Law School Rankings Methodology, first-time bar passage counts 18% in the overall ranking:

    Bar passage rate for first-time test-takers (18%): U.S. News used its treatment of bar passage rates to incorporate all graduates who took the bar for the first time, not just those from the state with the most test-takers. This de-emphasized the impact of geography on law schools’ relative performance.

    As was done with the 10-months-after-graduation indicator, this bar passage indicator was newly calculated as a two-year, nonweighted average pertaining to the 2023 and 2024 graduating classes.

    Specifically, the bar passage rate indicator scored schools on their average 2023 and 2024 first-time test-takers’ weighted bar passage rates among all jurisdictions, or states, then added or subtracted the average percentage point difference between those rates and the weighted state average among ABA-accredited schools’ first-time test-takers in the corresponding jurisdictions in 2023 and 2024. This meant schools that performed best on this ranking factor graduated students whose bar passage rates were both higher than most schools overall and higher compared with what was typical among graduates who took the bar in corresponding jurisdictions.

    For example, if a fictional law school in upstate New York graduated 100 students who first took the bar exam – and 79 took the New York exam, 18 the Massachusetts exam and three the Vermont exam – the school’s weighted average rate would use pass rate results that were weighted 79% for New York, 18% for Massachusetts and 3% for Vermont. This computation would then be compared with an index of these jurisdictions’ average pass rates – also weighted 79-18-3. (For privacy, school profiles on usnews.com display bar passage data only for jurisdictions with at least 10 test-takers.) Both weighted averages included any graduates who passed the bar with alternative pathways such as diploma privilege as having passed the bar. Alternative pathways is a method for J.D. graduates to be admitted to a state bar and allowed to practice law in that state without taking that state’s actual bar examination. Alternative pathways is generally based on attending and graduating from a law school in that state with the diploma privilege.

    Below is next year’s projected 2027-28 U.S. News ranking of the average first-time bar passage for calendar years 2024 and 2025. For comparison, the current 2026-27 U.S. News ranking of the average first-time bar passage for calendar years 2023 and 2024 are also included.

    RankSchool2027-2028
    First-Time Bar Passage    		2026-2027
    First-Time Bar Passage    		2026-2027
    First-Time
    Bar Passage
    Rank
    1Stanford112.90%114.02%2
    2Belmont112.58%112.43%4
    3Duke111.95%110.79%9
    4Chicago111.52%114.14%1
    5Harvard111.42%112.29%5
    6Yale110.56%111.52%8
    7Texas109.96%109.63%12
    8UCLA109.89%106.82%17
    9Texas A&M109.40%108.82%13
    10Michigan108.16%113.69%3
    11NYU107.97%110.04%11
    12Vanderbilt107.66%112.05%6
    13Penn107.38%111.63%7
    14USC107.14%100.28%37
    15Illinois106.60%87.71%84
    16Baylor106.57%106.30%19
    17Virginia106.25%110.37%10
    18SMU106.01%94.97%58
    19Alabama105.77%103.36%27
    20Ohio State105.63%103.87%25
    21BC105.59%108.18%14
    22UNC105.25%106.73%18
    23Minnesota105.07%101.85%35
    24Cornell104.83%108.12%15
    25Columbia104.79%108.02%16
    26Utah104.35%102.33%32
    27UC-Berkeley104.19%102.18%33
    28Kansas104.17%104.33%24
    29Boston Univ.103.38%98.61%45
    30Georgetown103.35%101.54%36
    31BYU103.12%101.92%34
    32Arizona State102.85%99.22%42
    33Florida102.62%97.85%48
    34UC-Davis102.02%96.29%55
    35Northwestern101.89%103.62%26
    36U. Wash.101.76%103.23%30
    37Wash & Lee101.40%93.73%64
    38Florida State101.18%99.29%41
    39Villanova101.06%105.10%20
    40Notre Dame100.88%104.96%21
    41Iowa100.86%97.56%50
    42Wash. U.100.81%104.40%23
    43Oklahoma100.18%100.24%38
    44Regent99.83%95.16%57
    45Florida Int’l99.82%104.45%22
    46Texas Tech99.73%98.14%47
    47Marquette99.65%99.18%43
    48Temple99.50%98.16%46
    49Wisconsin99.32%100.15%39
    50Seton Hall99.31%96.46%53
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  • Paul Caron

    SSRN Has Not Jumped the Shark

    SSRN, Strategic Update: Renewed Focus on Core Research Sharing Mission (Apr. 13, 2026)

    At SSRN, our mission is to rapidly share preprints and other early-stage research, empowering global scholars to help shape a better future. Today we are announcing an important change that reflects where we believe we can make the greatest contribution to that mission.

    We have decided to focus entirely on SSRN’s core function as a free, world-class preprint platform. As a result, we will be closing our commercial products (Research Paper Series, Sponsored Networks and Site Subscriptions, paid Conference Proceedings, Data Analytics Dashboards, Partners in Publishing, Jobs and Announcements, and Data Feeds) by the end of December 2026.

    Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA), The Social Science Research Network Has Jumped the Shark (June 3, 2026):

    Significant and unwelcome changes to what had been legal academia’s major open source scholarly repository and notice system. …

    The UCLA Law Library has notified our faulty that SSRN has announced “significant and unwelcome changes,” including:

    1. SSRN is discontinuing its Research Paper Series at the end of July.
    2. Already-published papers and book chapters will no longer be eligible for posting on SSRN after July.
    3. SSRN will require authors submitting preprints or working papers to select a CC-BY license. A CC-BY license permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the work, including for commercial purposes, so long as appropriate attribution is given.

    The research paper series has been an incredibly useful way of staying on top of recent scholarly developments. It gives you a listing of recently posted works and, crucially, each work’s abstract. As such, you know whether or not the paper looks to be of sufficient interest to justify downloading and reading the whole work. I shall miss it greatly.

    Disallowing published works means that open access to my publications will become more difficult. … As for the CC-BY copyright license, it is the most open and permissive Creative Commons license. It allows anyone—including AI providers—to copy, distribute, remix, adapt, or build upon a creator’s work, even commercially, provided they give the original author credit for the creation. Once applied, a CC-BY license cannot be revoked by the creator. The license remains valid for the duration of the copyright of that work. It guts the author’s ability to impose any more significant limitations.

    SSRN, Ongoing Commitment to Legal Scholarship (June 4, 2026):

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  • Paul Caron

    Layser: Renters’ Tax Credits

    Michelle Layser (San Diego), Renters’ Tax Credits, 113 Geo. L.J. 1107 (2025):

    America is facing an affordable housing crisis that current policies have failed to mitigate. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, half of American tenants were rent burdened, paying more than one-third of their income on rent. For this reason, Renters’ Tax Credit (RTC) proposals are gaining traction in Washington and in policy circles. The most ambitious proposals would reimburse tenants for rent payments that exceed 30 percent of their income level, subject to rent limits. In scale and significance, such RTCs would almost certainly overshadow—or even replace—the nontax Housing Choice Voucher program that has been the centerpiece of federal housing policy since 1974. It would be the first time since 1993 that a large, existing nontax public welfare program was shifted into the Tax Code, and it would be the first time that a major nontax, in-kind welfare benefit was integrated into the tax system.

    Through a case study of the evolution of American housing policy, the recent failures of the Housing Choice Voucher Program, and current RTC proposals, this Article explores the potential and limits of in-kind integration of housing benefits in the tax system.

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  • Paul Caron

    A Law School Dean, a Secret Recording, and Questions That Linger

    Following up on last Sunday’s post, UC-Berkeley Law School Cracks Down on AI: Chronicle of Higher Education, A Dean, a Secret Recording, and Questions That Linger:

    Erwin Chemerinsky on AI, DEI, and that video that won’t go away.

    Last month, the law school at the University of California at Berkeley released a terse new AI policy prohibiting use of AI for “conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit.” It forbids using AI to correct grammar. It permits AI only for “identifying sources, such as cases, statutes, or secondary sources” but goes on to warn: “Citations to sources that do not exist will raise a presumption of prohibited AI use.”

    The policy has received an inordinate amount of attention — because of its brevity and severity, because Berkeley is prestigious and proximate to Silicon Valley, and because the strictures struck some observers as impracticable. Joshua Gellers, a dean and AI scholar at the University of North Florida, declared it “the worst AI policy in higher education.” It has also been greeted by some fellow deans as a model. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school, says that he’s heard from several who are leaning on the Berkeley policy to craft their own.

    Chemerinsky is the author or co-author of more than 20 books, including Free Speech on Campus (Yale University Press, 2017), and a former president of the Association of American Law Schools. He is a renowned constitutional scholar and prominent liberal commentator. He’s also no stranger to controversy.

    A few weeks after the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023, Chemerinsky took to the pages of the Los Angeles Times to decry what he described as the most intense antisemitism he’d ever experienced on campus, and chastised college leaders for failing to speak out for fear of sounding Islamophobic. Calls for the elimination of Israel, he wrote, are antisemitic. Over the next year, there were protests at his house and he and his wife received death threats. He believes he was targeted because he’s Jewish.

    Chemerinsky has also been a vocal proponent of diversity. In a sharply argued 2023 article co-authored with Sharon Inkelas, a linguist and administrator at Berkeley, Chemerinsky smacked down the idea that diversity statements pose any threat to academic freedom or intellectual diversity, or that they were misused as a political litmus test. So I was surprised when he told me that, while he remains committed to the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion — indeed, he can’t understand how anyone could be opposed — he’s soured on diversity statements, acknowledging that they were sometimes misused.

    The genially disheveled Chemerinsky spoke early in the morning from the law school.

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  • Paul Caron

    Trump Lets IRS Fire More Positions at Will

    Bloomberg Law, IRS Can Fire More Positions at Will With Trump Executive Order:

    Trump’s order strips job security from almost 8,000 federal positions. Under Office of Personnel Management regulations, employees moved into a new job classification—known as Schedule Policy/Career—lose many of the procedural protections most federal workers have, including the right to appeal their removal to an independent body.

    A slew of job types could be reclassified at the IRS and its legal arm, according to an appendix released by the White House. More are on the list for the Treasury Department. IRS workers who are senior advisors, human resource specialists, and program managers are among those who could be impacted. For the IRS’s chief counsel office, attorney advisors, senior level counselors to the commissioner, counselor to the general counselor, and senior legal advisor for regulatory affairs will be reclassified.

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  • Kevin R Johnson

    Article: Christopher David Ruiz Cameron, Standard Deviations: The Origins of Affirmative Action at the Harvard Law Review

    The Trump administration is not fond of anything that might be classified as a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policy. In 2025, the administration opened two investigations into Harvard University and the Harvard Law Review over allegedly factoring race into article selection decisions of the law review.

    Whatever the investigation finds, it is unquestionably the case that the Harvard Law Review embraced an affirmative action plan decades ago and that it evolved in a variety of ways. Standard Deviations: The Origins of Affirmative Action at the Harvard Law Review by Professor Christopher David Ruiz Cameron is the first law review article documenting the history of affirmative action and its evolution into DEI at the Harvard Law Review (HLR). The Article situates HLR’s controversial adoption of race-conscious membership criteria in 1980s between two other sets of historical events: the American legal education reform movement and the rise of the student-edited law review in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the decline of affirmative action and the subsequent attack on DEI by the Trump Administration in the early 21st century.

    Professor Cameron and I were editors when the Harvard Law Review adopted its first affirmative action plan. As ably laid out on the article, the adoption process was memorable.

  • Sloan Speck

    NYU Hosts AMT/EITC Conference

    On June 4 and 5, 2026, NYU School of Law hosted the 2026 Association of Mid-Career Tax Scholars/Experienced in Tax Joint Conference (AMT/EITC). Participants and panels, below the fold.

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  • Sloan Speck

    Salinas et al.: Law Professors Prefer AI over Peer Answers

    Alejandro Salinas (Stanford), Carly Frieders, Neel Guha, Sibo Ma et al., Law Professors Prefer AI over Peer Answers (May 27, 2026):

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  • Kevin R Johnson

    AI to the Rescue? AI is the End? The Feeding Frenzy Over AI

    A headline in the Wall Street Journal recently read that the “American rebellion against AI is gaining steam.” Commencement speakers have been booed for mentioning Artificial Intelligence.

    Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches – YouTube

    There is lots of chatter about AI dominating discussions at law schools. Many schools are having speakers come in to talk about some aspect of AI and the challenges it presents. E-mail missives, webinars, panel discussions, etc. are everywhere. We could have AI 24/7, just listening to AI podcasts. Will there soon be a cable channel AIPN modeled after ESPN? Anxiety abounds. I find that just seeing or hearing AI mentioned induces stress even if the information is presented in a straight-forward and non-sensationalistic way.

    Although careful appraisal of developments in AI certainly is warranted, I worry that we may be seeing an overreaction to change that is unnecessarily increasing, not decreasing, anxiety levels. Andy Kessler in this Wall Street Journal piece (“Ignore the Hysteria”) (registration required) observes this phenomenon.

    Not that long ago, law schools were scrambling to address the many urgencies of the COVID pandemic. Zoom was the designated devil and the death of legal education was the feared outcome. I will be the first to admit that it was kind of a mess at the time. As dean, I certainly had my hands full. Many of the reactions resembled those that we see today with respect to AI. Anxious e-mails from faculty, students, administrators, and community came in slews. The same seems to be true with AI. As the lay of the land became clearer, tensions, worry about the pandemic and its impacts, calmed. AI will no doubt change things but will the anxiety subside? And, if so, when, how, and why?

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