Author: Jeremy Paul
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Not So Practice-Ready
Washington University Professor Robert Kuehn shares via SSRN his work in the Clinical Legal Association Newsletter reporting on the results of a recent 2024-25 survey of 4,000 judges and 4,400 practicing attorneys undertaken by the Committee on Legal Education and Admissions Reform. Roughly half believe that law schools still are not preparing students adequately for…
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Book of the Week
Coming this month a new monograph from one of the pre-eminent university leaders of our era. Lee Bollinger delivers University: A Reckoning In it Columbia’s Professor and former President Bollinger offers a robust defense of the University and the centrality of the search for truth and freedom of expression to preserving our constitutional values. Never…
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Novel Critique of AI
Professors Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey of Boston University offer a profound critique of AI that you won’t read elsewhere. As they put it, “we hope to convince you of one simple and urgent point:the current design of artificial intelligence systems facilitates the degradation anddestruction of our critical civic institutions.” You can find their work…
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Full-Time JD Study in Charlotte
Following its merger with Queens University, Elon University plans to bring full time law school back to Charlotte, currently the largest major U.S. city without such a program. See details here.
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Book of the Week
How can you not be drawn in by a serious effort from a journalist to tackle the paradoxes, challenges, and ultimate salvation lurking in the concept of democracy? Even more so, when he tells you that his motivation stemmed from boredom with mainstream press coverage of politics. The New Republic’s Contributing Editor and Guardian Columnist,…
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SSRN Author Rankings
Year end results for total 2025 downloads are here. Sort of our version of the NYTimes bestseller list. Those who appear are proud and excited. Those who do not point out that quantity and quality don’t always mesh. In any event, two scholars, Daniel Solove and Cass Sunstein clearly stand at the top of the…
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2026 Preview for Law Schools
Karen Sloan has a nice overview story for Reuters outlining some of the changes and pressures facing law schools in the new year. Find it here . Of particular interest is Santa Clara’s decision to award $16,000 scholarships to students to bring them all below the $50,000 cap that the Trump Administration has imposed on…
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Legal Educators with Sway
National Jurist is out with a list of the 25 most influential people in legal education, a list they compiled mostly by surveying law school deans. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the list includes a large (some might say very large) number of deans and ex-deans. I know many of the chosen few (admittedly, an ex-dean myself) and…
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Book of the Week
I missed this book when it appeared in 2024 (sounds longer ago today than it did on Wednesday), but I’m reading it now and it’s a treat. What Laura Field does so elegantly in describing the intellectual history of today’s New Right in Furious Minds, John Ganz does equally well identifying origins of today’s turmoil…
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Law Firms and Private Equity Overseas
Law.com has done it again with an insightful recap of several powerful moves by private equity players to invest in small and mid-sized law firms outside the U.S. eventually, perhaps, paving the way for financial investors to capture Big Law. Law schools ignore these changes at our peril. Check the story out here: https://www.law.com/2025/12/31/5-private-equity-plays-that-are-rewiring-international-law-firm-financing/?kw=5+Private+Equity+Plays+That+Are+Rewiring+International+Law+Firm+Financing&utm_source=email&utm_medium=enl&utm_campaign=newsroomupdate&utm_content=20251231&utm_term=law&oly_enc_id=6899F7393967D1A&slreturn=20251231103355
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Awards for Patricia Williams
My breathtakingly talented Northeastern colleague, Particia WIlliams, will receive not one, but two awards at this year’s AALS annual meeting. The Section on Minority Groups will present her with its Impact Legacy Award and the Section on Women in Legal Education will justly recognize her, along with NYU’s Peggy Cooper Davis, with its Ruth Bader…
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Legal Tech Developments
Law.com offers a nice issue exploring various ways that law schools and law firms are innovating with legal tech, including a revamped contracts course using AI from Mitchell Hamline professor Gregory Duhl. You can find it here: https://www.law.com/2025/12/30/how-law-schools-advanced-legal-tech-in-2025-/?kw=How+Law+Schools+Advanced+Legal+Tech+in+2025
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Book of the Week
Following up on her widely-acclaimed monograph, The Code of Capital, Katharina Pistor, the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School offers us this fall, The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It. In an admirably concise effort, she tackles topics made central by the legal realists involving the role of…
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Amicus Brief Decisive?
Adam Liptak’s NYTimes story, linked below, carefully explains how Georgetown Law Professor, Marty Lederman’s amicus brief may have provided the key argument leading the Supreme Court to put a pause on President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Illinois. Who says legal scholars can’t make a difference? Whether one agrees with Marty’s argument or…
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New Dean at Yale
Yale names Cristina Rodriguez, currently the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law on its own Faculty to serve as its next dean, where she will be the Sol and Lillian Goldman Dean and Professor of Law. Her extraordinarily impressive qualifications for this prestigious post are well detailed in the press release you can find below.…
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Book of the Week
Former Faculty member at Rhodes College, Georgetown, and American University, Laura K. Field has done all of us a great service in her new book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. Political leaders and pundits everywhere have decried many excesses of the current Administration in Washington. Now Dr. Field, a fellow in…
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International Students – Home Countries
Northwestern Professor Carole Silver and Northwestern Data Scientist Ritika Giri have performed an invaluable service to the legal academy and the country at large by providing a systematic study of the home countries of the many international students who choose to study law in the U.S., particularly in LL.M. programs You can find their paper…
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Skadden Fellowships
The Skadden Foundation has announced this year’s 34 recipients of the 2026 Skadden Fellowships. You can find the stunningly impressive group listed and described here: https://www.skaddenfellowships.org Harvard led the way with six students receiving Fellowships. NYU had four. Northeastern had three. Georgetown and Yale each had two. One fellowship was awarded to students from Boston…
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Book of the Week
My Northeastern colleague, Professor of Law and Biology Jonathan Kahn has penned a fascinating exploration of how the concept of diversity (often racial diversity) has unwittingly contributed to the perpetuation of biological conceptions of race in a variety of settings: The Uses of Diversity (Columbia Univ. Press. 2025) His analysis is far more penetrating, but…
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New Voices at SCOTUSblog
SCOTUSblog yesterday announced a new blog titled The Interim Docket Blog co-authored by well-known law professors, Harvard’s Jack Goldsmith, the University of Chicago’s William Baude, and Washington University’s Daniel Epps. This comes roughly 8 months after Dispatch Media purchased SCOTUSblog from its founders, Tom Goldstein and Amy Howe (the site’s pre-eminent analyst). You can find…
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Legal History Awards
University of Miami Professor of Law and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar, Kunal M. Parker has been awarded the John Phillip Reed Book Award by the American Society for Legal History, for his monograph The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2024). The full list of this year’s awards is here: https://aslh.net/aslh-book-prize-winners-2025/
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Ranking of On-line and Flex JD Programs
University Magazine has released it’s ranking of the nation’s online and Flex JD Programs. You can find it here. universitymagazine.ca/best-online-law-schools-america Of course, I was delighted to see Northeastern at number one.
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Book of the Week
This one’s a couple of years old, but it’s so well done, I couldn’t skip it. For a profound diagnosis of what ails America and the West, I suggest The Twilight of the American State by Pierre Schlag, University Distinguished Professor and Byron R. White Professor of Law at the University of Colorado. You can…
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Truth to Power
University of Alabama Law Professor, Joyce Vance, claps back at our President. Her words, linked below, need no embellishment. But for our purposes it’s worth noting that “Quiet Piggy” is simply unacceptable language from persons in leadership speaking to journalists seeking to discern the facts. And such demeaning talk thwarts our efforts as legal educators…
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To AI or Not to AI
In his recent article, Solving Professors’ Dilemmas about Prohibiting or Promoting Student AI Use, John Lande, Isidor Loeb Professor of Law, Emeritus at the University of Missouri has tackled a topic on the minds of many of us teaching students for whom AI will play a large role in their careers. Should we slow them…