Author: Jeremy Paul
-
Book of the Week
Professor Jessica de Perio WIttman, Director of the Thomas J. Meskill Library at the the University of Connecticut School of Law and Beth G. Adelman, Director of the Law Library and Vice Dean for Legal Information Services at the University of Buffalo have been awarded the 2026 Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award by the…
-
What if 1L’s just won’t read
In My Students Can’t Read, Tyler Jagt, a teacher of literature and creative writing at several universities writes movingly in The Chronicle of Higher Education about his experiences with students who simply cannot handle the same level of reading assignments that his students managed easily just a few years ago. https://www.chronicle.com/article/my-students-cant-read. Those students are headed…
-
Legal Education’s Greatest Hits Revisited
The editors of the Journal of Legal Education, now housed at UCIrvine and New York Law School, had the great idea of inviting today’s law faculty members to look back on some of the most influential articles published in the JLE over the past 40 years. These reflections are collected in a forthcoming double issue,…
-
Book of the Week
Due out this month from Yale University Press is this counterintuitive monograph from my Northeastern colleague, Beth Simone Noveck: Reboot – AI and the Race to Save Democracy. Professor Noveck makes the case that AI holds promise to strengthen democracy rather than merely standing as a threat to the enlightenment culture, which has long nourished…
-
Has AI Killed Higher Education?
Owen Yingling, a writer and editor for the New Critic and a philosophy student at the University of Chicago has penned this provocative essay concerning the effect of Artificial Intelligence on the modern university. He calls it The Great Zombification as a way to signal that universities where professors are delivering AI-written lectures to students…
-
Law Professors Prefer AI Answers
In a rigorous study aimed at determining whether AI has progressed to where it can navigate the sort of critical thinking required for legal education Stanford Law Professor Julian Nyarko, along with co-authors, Yale Law Professor Sarath Sanga and Stanford Liftlab’s Researcher, Alenjandro Salinas, have reached some potentially unsettling conclusions. Using a clever research design,…
-
Book of the Week
Due 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…
-
The Stories Behind the Cases
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…
-
Firm Foundations: Bold Aspirations
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/opinion/big-law-legal-system.html?unlocked_article_code=1.l1A.TtbU.I15UYo0f0bKq&smid=url-share I suppose we should all be reading what the NYTimes is featuring about many members of our profession. Our author, Matthew Wollin appears not to have paid attention at NYU Law School, which has one of the top legal writing programs in the nation. I’m sure his teachers explained quite carefully that the presentation…
-
Book of the Week
It’s not every day that a 94 year-old releases a new book. But I can’t wait to read this insider account of how judges make decisions from the judge I admired most from my time clerking at the Second Circuit in 1982-83. Early in my tenure I helped the judge for whom I clerked draft…
-
Why Commercial Law
On behalf of the ABA’s Commercial Law Education Task Force, Professors Anthony Palermo (Stetson), Kara Bruce (Univ. of North Carolina) and Laura Coordes (Arizona State) have posted to SSRN an open letter written to deans of U.S. Law Schools urgin them to make it a priority to offer commercial law courses, including those covering secured…
-
Human Rights Here at Home
This year’s Bringing Human Rights Home Lawyers Network Symposium: Human Rights and Local Resistance: From Criminalization of Civic Spaces to Action, will be held on June 4, 2026, at the University of Pennsylvania, jointly sponsored by NUSL’s Center for Global Law & Justice and the Gittis Legal Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. .Event information and…
-
ABA Council Votes to End Diversity Standard
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/american-bar-association-votes-eliminate-dei-rule-law-schools-2026-05-15 The prior rule, which has been suspended since February 2025, required ABA accredited law schools to consider diversity in recruitment, admissions and student programming. Of course this decisions comes with the backdrop of pressure from the Trump Administration, which opposes diversity, equity and inclusion as factors in accreditation and has threatened to remove the…
-
Book of the Week
Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA and winner of the 2021 AALS Triennial Award for Lifetime Service to Legal Education is just out with Backtalker: An American Memoir from Simon and Schuster. It tells her personal story and explores the experiences that helped shape her insight into the concept of intersectionality for…
-
This round to the profs, BUT??
The Boston Globe tells the story of tenured medical school professors at Tufts who prevailed in a lawsuit against the university, arguing that changes to the terms and conditions of their employment were not consistent with the academic tenure the profs had earned and been promised. But the story explains how the tenure system nationwide…
-
Are law profs to blame for today’s S.Ct.
Renowned political commentator Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo, offers an iconclastic take on how we got to the point where Supreme Court justices are taking inappropriate gifts and reaching unjust outcomes. He notes the trend over many decades of professionalizing the bench through dominance of elite law schools and wonders aloud if law faculty…
-
Is AI the Devil?
As co-author of a book called Getting to Maybe, it’s no surprise that my answer to this question is that it is and it isn’t. But here’s some actual evidence on the question produced in a study using University of Minnesota law students by four faculty members at the University of Minnesota Law School (listed…
-
Book of the Week
Most readers of this blog are familiar with the devastating impact that makers and prescribers of opiates have had on the fabric of life in the United States. In Rehab: An American Scandal, Marshall Project journalist, Shoshanna Walter, calls our attention to the flip side of the coin. Once people have become dependent on addictive…
-
Life of a Law Prof
The internet has so many corners it’s impossible to peer into them all. One, which I had previously neglected, contains a podcast by two folks, Mason Laney and Will Johnson, who call themselves “Christian Conservative Bachelors at Harvard Law”. It’s called Approach the Bench, and this week it features a lengthy interview with William Nelson…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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…