Author: Jeremy Paul
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What Happens when Woke Dies
Katherine Mangan in the Chronicle of Higher Education raises and reports on key issues facing public universities in states where lawmakers are restricting what faculty may say in the classroom. If students, on chat rooms or elsewhere, begin to propagate truly hateful rhetoric, how are administrators and faculty to make clear that such destructive speech,
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LSAC dodges lawsuit (for now)
Karen Sloan and Mike Scarcella of Reuters report here on U.S. District Judge John Murphy of Philadelphia tossing an anti-monoply suit against the LSAC. Plaintiffs claim the Council facilitates collaboration on such items as application fees and more broadly that LSAC has monopolized the admissions process. Murphy found these claims might have merit but as
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Book of the Week
The incomparable Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, has assembled this thought-provoking collection of essays under the title Is Democracy Doomed? It’s just published. The many distinguished authors (I snuck in too) reflect broadly on the forces that have led to our current era of polarization and
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Why the Rich Aren’t Taxed Enough
Last week, I blogged about Boston College Professor Ray Madoff’s article in the Atlantic pushing for abolition of the estate tax. Now Professor Madoff is back with a fuller, oral version of her thesis on the popular NYTimes podcast hosted by Ezra Klein: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ray-madoff.html?unlocked_article_code=1.e1A.snvm.ZxAOSpgZAlot&smid=url-share. She explains carefully and without rancor how our tax system allows
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How Heavy is the State’s Hand?
The AALS Clinical Conference begins today (May 1) in Portland, Oregon. https://clinical.aals.org/. A topic on everyone’s mind will be how the dramatic shift in political winds in Washington has influenced faculty teaching in clinical progams throughout the U.S. Washington University Professor Robert Kuehn offers us a cogent analysis. You can find the abstract here. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6668559.
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What if 1Ls Won’t Read?
In a recent article in the Nebraska Law Review, University of Oregon Clinical Professor Elizabeth Ruiz Frost asks a question that should make us all take notice. Reading is Dead: Can Law Schools Make Lawyers from Non-Readers?, 104 Neb. L. Rev. 293 (2025). After thoroughly documenting and rightly decrying the decline in overall reading skills in
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Book of the Week
Northeastern paid tribute this month to retiring University Distinguished Professor of Law, Margaret Burnham. The event held in her honor was one of the most inspirational celebrations of a career that I have ever attended. Scholars shared tales of how Margaret’s work had led them to greater heights and deeper insights. Clients told stories of
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Remembering Charles Ogletree
The Harvard Law School Library recently hosted an event commemorating the legacy of Professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr. ’78 and celebrating the completion of the Charles J. Ogletree Jr. Working Papers Digitization Project, ensuring his deep insights will continue to benefit future scholars. Ogletree, who died in 2023, was a champion for racial equality and
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How to Tax Billionaires
Who could ask for a more counter intuitive argument than that offered by Boston College law professor Ray Madoff in her recent article in the Atlantic The first step to taxing billionaires, she contends, is to abolish the estate tax, Seems odd, but she makes a strong case, which you can find here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/estate-tax-billionaires-wealth/686770/?gift=3c3eLbie5lXpHEM65bA3YfS-2jSureaCYm_0XZG9KS4&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
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Book of the Week
It’s one thing to criticize this or any President from the comfort of the faculty lounge. It’s quite another to lose one’s job and then deliver a detailed chronicle of concrete executive branch failings resulting in untold harm to innocent people around the world. That’s what Nicholas Enrich, a longtime civil servant at the U.S.
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Judges Jump the Gun Again
The Harvard Crimson reports that a group of conservative federal judges are once again wreaking havoc with the idea that clerkship hiring should be delayed until a fixed deadline. Judges for decades have attempted, abandoned and attempted again to set a date to level the playing field and bring order to the process for overworked
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Who picks a Dean
This guest essay from the Louisville Courier Journal tells a story about what happened in March at the University of Kentucky Law School when, according to the author, the University leadership named a federal judge, Greg Van Tatenhoveas, dean over the express objection of a substantial majority of the law faculty. Of course, if accurately
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Book of the Week
What lessons should we draw from the fact that so many of our routine ways of building legal culture (e.g. powerful appellate courts; law schools as separate parts of universities) were created when formalism was the dominant paradigm for understanding how law works? Have we fully tackled how these institutions could best function now that
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DOJ Independence
In the week when our President fired the Attorney General amidst speculation that her sin was failure to more aggressively prosecute his political enemies, it’s worth looking back on a remarkable speech from April 1940 given by Attorney General (and later Supreme Court Justice) Robert H. Jackson appropriately titled The Federal Prosecutor. Hat tip to
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Who’s Woke Now
Elise Stefanik has penned a new book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities, which should attract our attention, if only because it represents her attempt to build upon her widely seen performance at congressional hearings that led to departures of prominent academic leaders. But what really
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Book of the Week
Boston University Professor of Law, Aziza Ahmed, brings us this fascinating story of how the feminist movement played a key role in changing the shape of the fight against AIDS. She teases out complex interrelationships between social and scientific knowledge that illustrate how misconceptions can be overcome through sustained resistance. You can find the book
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Navigating the New Health Law Landscape
Northeastern University’s Center for Health Policy and Law holds its annual health law conference today, April 3. Event schedule can be found here. Dr. Rachel Pearson, MD, PhD., author of No Apparent Distress: A Doctor’s Coming-of-Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine will deliver the keynote address at 9 a.m.
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Ivy Walls, Empty Halls
UT Austin Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy, David DeMatthews offers a telling account in the Chronicle of Higher Ed of how contemporary conditions (zoom technology; long commutes; family obligations; and pressure to be visible around the country if not the world) have led to fewer faculty members on campus to share informal interactions with
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Book of the Week
Beth Macy, author of the widely acclaimed Dopesick, which tells the story of the pharmaceutical’s role in the opioid crisis, now brings us a searing memoir detailing her very personal story of how the hollowing out of America’s heartland has devastated her hometown and wreaked havoc with her family. Taking its title, Paper Girl, from
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American Constitution Society Convention in June
Early bird registration for this year’s ACS convention ends Tuesday. March 31. Here’s a preview. You can register here. Join the American Constitution Society as we celebrate our 25th Anniversary and welcome new ACS President Phil Brest for the premier progressive legal gathering of the year. The 2026 ACS National Convention will bring together lawyers,
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Financing Law School as Feds Pull Back
Law Schools everywhere will be thinking hard about how students will pay the bills once the $50,000 federal cap kicks in this fall. Now the University of Kansas and Washington University have decided to launch their own loan programs with fixed interest rates to spare students some of the less advantageous features of private loans.
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Book of the Week
A. Mechele Dickerson, Arthur L. Moller Chair in Bankruptcy Law and Practice, at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law offers a powerful account of what is happening to Lower and Middle Income people in the United States. In The Middle Class New Deal. she traces the history of policies that our country
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New Landscape for Student Loans
Long before the federal government took over student loans, the nonprofit organization now known as AccessLex Institute®, has been active in helping students finance their legal education. One tool AccessLex provides free of charge is a Student Loan Calculator, which helps students evaluate borrowing options and potential repayment plans. Now that calculator has been updated
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Training Judges about the Social Determinants of Health
Many of us no doubt recall the highly influential training of judges on law and economics sponsored by the Olin Foundation, described here. My colleague at Northeastern, Wendy Parmet, wisely spotted the need for a similar program acquainting judges with key issues in public health. Better still, she has founded such a program, dubbed Salus
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Did Trump Official Go Too Far?
First Amendment Watch reports how the Office of Disciplinary Counsel of the D.C. Bar has accused Ed Martin, the former interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, of potential misconduct based on a letter he sent to Georgetown Law Dean William Treanor threatening not to hire any Georgetown students unless Georgetown ceased all DEI