Carnegie Mellon University(CMU) had a very good day — $3 billion good. “Carnegie Mellon University . . . and Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin today announced a historic $3 billion gift to further elevate CMU in Pittsburgh and launch Carnegie Mellon University Miami, a new campus designed to pioneer a model for higher education built for the next era of American innovation. CMU Miami will be a new campus organized around societal challenges, designed to prepare future leaders for a rapidly changing world while accelerating research and discovery in areas of critical importance to society.” (bold added).
Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
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CNN: “Alleged gang rape at Cornell turns spotlight on campus sexual assault”
The Cornell sexual assault case have been EVERYWHERE in the news in the last week. I imagine that the case is being discussed in law schools across the country. I know that I have talked about it with a few colleagues. The allegations are horrific. Sadly, I do not think that such events are limited to any one university. Universities should strive to model cultures that discourage the potential for such violence and appropriately punish such violence. I am left to wonder whether universities, including law schools, are doing enough in this regard.
Here is what Microsoft Copilot says Cornell should have done:
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Call for Tax Papers and Panels: Law & Society Annual Meeting
Neil Buchanan has issued his annual call for tax papers and panels for next year’s annual meeting of the Law & Society Association in Chicago, Illinois (June 22–26, 2027):
The Law & Society Association (LSA) will host its next Global Meeting from June 22 to 26, 2027, in Hong Kong. For the 23rd year in a row, I am organizing sessions for the “Law, Society, and Taxation” group — also known as Collaborative Research Network (CRN) 31. And for what is now the eleventh year in a row, I am delighted to be working with Professors Jennifer Bird-Pollan and Mirit Eyal-Cohen as co-organizers.
You can find the Call for Submissions email that LSA sent last week here. This year’s official conference theme is “Law in Motion,” but as always, you are not bound by the official theme of the conference, Jennifer, Mirit, and I will give full consideration to proposals in any area of tax law, tax policy, distributive justice, and so on. And as always, we especially encourage and welcome interdisciplinary scholarship.
The deadline for submissions is October 27, 2026 at 12noon Eastern Daylight Time (UTC +4). . . .
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Merritt McAlister Named Dean of the University of Florida Levin College of Law
From the announcement from the University of Florida:
I am pleased to announce that Merritt McAlister has been appointed dean of the University of Florida Levin College of Law following a nationwide search. The appointment is effective immediately.
The Levin College of Law, Florida’s premier law school, is nationally recognized for excellence in legal education, influential scholarship, and public service. The dean’s leadership is critical to continuing to enhance the college’s stature and extend its influence and impact. I am confident that Dean McAlister is the right leader for that role. Dean McAlister joined the University of Florida law faculty in 2018 and has served as interim dean since June 2023. She is also the Levin, Mabie & Levin Professor of Law.
Before joining UF, she spent eight years in private practice with King & Spalding, where she became a partner in the firm’s national appellate practice. She clerked for Judge R. Lanier Anderson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and for Justice John Paul Stevens on the United States Supreme Court.
Read more from the announcement; see also Nick Anschultz, Merritt McAlister Named Permanent Dean of UF Levin College of Law, Main Street Daily News (Gainesville), September 28, 2026.
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NYU Law to Host Event on Loper Bright and the Future of Tax Administration
The Graduate Tax Program at the NYU School of Law is hosting two panels on how the Loper Bright decision might affect judicial deference to Treasury Regulations in the Greenberg Lounge of Vanderbilt Hall (40 Washington Square South, New York, NY) on Thursday, October 8, 2026, from 1:00–3:30pm, with a reception to follow.
Panel 1: The Deference Landscape Prior to Loper Bright, and the Loper Bright Decision Itself (1:00–1:50pm)
- V. Patrice Wylly, Moderator (NYU)
- Gregg Polsky (NYU)
- Adam Samaha (NYU)
Panel 2: Assessing the Impact of Loper Bright to Date and Contemplating the Path Forward (2:00–3:30pm)
- Brant J. Hellwig, Moderator (NYU)
- Dahlia Mignouna (NYU, Tax Law Center)
- Richard Reinhold (IRS)
- David M. Schizer (Columbia)
- Michael J. Desmond (Miller & Chevalier)
To register, click here, and for further questions about the event, please email law.taxprograms@nyu.edu.
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Coverage of NACIQI Hearing re the ABA Council and National Accreditation
Last week, The National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity— a panel that advises the U.S. Department of Education on accreditation matters — held a hearing on whether the ABA Council should continue as the national accreditor of law schools. The Committee last Thursday morning voted 11-1 to report that its members couldn’t reach a recommendation. As reported, “Under Secretary Nicholas Kent will now have 90 days to make a final determination on whether to deny the ABA council federal recognition. If Kent decides to end the council’s recognition, the accrediting agency can then appeal that decision to U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon.The council could also seek legal action if it lost federal recognition.”
It was an unusual hearing. Regardless of one’s view of the ABA Council, during the hearing the Committee asked few questions focused on what many view as critical issues: how unraveling the national accreditation system might impact the quality of legal education in the United States; how de-recognition or continued recognition might impact students, law schools, or the profession, including the impact on those schools whose students rely on ABA accreditation for access to federal financial aid; or how de-recognition might increase regulation or costs if schools are required to comply with multiple state accreditors to maintain bar exam eligibility for all students. The concerns focused primarily on two issues: (1) whether the Council was no longer sufficiently separate and independent from the ABA lawyer’s association; and (2) whether the Council was improper for not more quickly suspending Standard 206 (it suspended the standard after it received guidance from the Department of Education under the Trump Administration in early 2025, but during the Biden Administration had continued to follow the guidance it received from the Department of Education under the Biden Administration).
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Choi Presents “AI Deceleration (or Acceleration) by Taxation” Today at Missouri
Jonathan Choi (Wash U) will present AI Deceleration (or Acceleration) by Taxation, coauthored with Paul Connell (Wisconsin), at Missouri today as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium hosted by David Gamage, from 2:00 to 3:15 pm (CDT). The session will be open to guest participants via Zoom. Anyone who would like to join as a guest participant should email Professor Gamage directly for details, the Zoom login, and for a draft of the paper.
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Call for Proposals: New Ideas for (Manageable!) Learning Exercises
A new call for proposals from the Journal of Legal Education for a panel at the 2027 AALS Annual Meeting in New York. Proposals should be submitted to jlesubmissions@aals.org by noon (EDT) on Monday, October 26. The details are below and the next page.
This interactive program at the 2027 AALS Annual Meeting sponsored by the Journal of Legal Education will showcase innovative learning experiences in foundational law courses. We are seeking proposals for learning exercises or assessments that have proven effective, and importantly, are workable within realistic faculty and student time constraints.
The session will be organized as a teaching exchange. Selected presenters will each host a station where they will explain and demonstrate their exercise to rotating groups of participants. The goal is to provide attendees with concrete ideas they can readily adapt for foundational courses including Civil Procedure, Contracts, Corporations, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Constitutional Law, Evidence, Legal Research & Writing, Professional Responsibility, Property, Torts, Wills & Trusts, and other core subjects, while advancing broader conversations about excellent practices in teaching and learning.
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Good News: Law.com — Law School Applicant Boom Expected to Continue
Christine Charonsky for Law.com (subscription required) has the details. The highpoints:
“For the past two years, applicants have increased: 8% this year, 18% last year.
More than 90% of surveyed admissions officers expect the 2026–2027 cycle to be at least as competitive as the previous cycle.
Admissions officers overwhelmingly identified the U.S. political climate as a significant factor driving increased interest in law school.”A Trump bump for law school admissions?
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Foreign Tax Advantages after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
Anmol Bhandari and Ellen McGrattan (Minnesota) have a new NBER working paper, “Foreign Tax Advantages after the U.S. Tax Reform of 2017” (September 2026). Here is the abstract:
We construct a firm-year panel of income-tax rate reconciliations from annual 10-K filings of public companies to study the effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) on U.S. multinational profit shifting. These reconciliations decompose the gap between company-level effective tax rates and the federal statutory corporate tax rate, allowing us to isolate the contribution of foreign tax advantages before and after the reform. We find that TCJA significantly reduced the tax rate gap and increased effective tax rates for companies most exposed to pre-TCJA international tax benefits. This resulted in an onshoring of profits with foreign profit shares falling 1.3 percentage points per percentage point of tax increase. Among more exposed companies, we find no differential change in investment, employment, or the geographic distribution of sales and installed capital. A neoclassical model of a multinational that chooses where to book its income rationalizes this pattern: the reform raised the average tax on income booked abroad relative to income booked at home, which governs where profits are reported, while the marginal tax on capital, which governs investment, changed by an amount common to all firms. Controlling for deferred-tax windfall gains leaves our main results unchanged.
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