Author: Paul Caron
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Jim Gadwood, Vice Chair of Miller & Chevalier’s Tax Department, May Be Next IRS Chief Counsel
Bloomberg Law, Tax Controversy Lawyer Is in Line for Top Counsel Job at IRS: Private-sector lawyer Jim Gadwood is being vetted to become IRS Chief Counsel, according to a person familiar with the process. If confirmed, he would be the fourth person in the role since President Donald Trump took office. … Gadwood, now vice…
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NY Times: Spielberg, Aliens, and God
New York Times Op-Ed: Does U.F.O. Disclosure Threaten Faith?, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025)): Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” is a movie in which characters argue about whether the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be a threat to religion, something that a great many people have decided to argue about since the Pentagon started releasing tranches…
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WSJ: Will the Pope Apologize to AI?
Following up on my previous post, Pope Leo on AI: Magnifica Humanitatis: Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: Will the Pope Owe an Apology to AI?, by Cameron Berg (B.S. (Cognitive Science) 2022, Yale; Founder & Director, Reciprocal Research: Developing the Empirical Science of AI Consciousness): In his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo XIV frames the future of…
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WaPo: What Is Suffering For? After My Sister Died, I Found the Answer.
Following up on my previous post, Finding Meaning in Suffering: Washington Post: What Is Suffering For? After My Sister Died, I Found the Answer., by Helen Andrews: My sister was born with profound disabilities, the result of a genetic disorder. She never learned to talk. I don’t think she could even recognize the faces of…
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Pepperdine Caruso Law Hosts 2nd Annual State Of Religious Freedom Conference
Following up on last year’s inaugural State Of Religious Freedom Conference in Switzerland, we welcomed over 50 scholars, judges, and practitioners from around the world to Malibu last week. See the program here.
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Projected 2027-28 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Ultimate Bar Passage Rate
In the current 2026-27 U.S. News Law School Rankings Methodology, ultimate bar passage counts 7% in the overall ranking: Ultimate bar passage rate (7%): While passing the bar on the first try is optimal, passing eventually is critical. Underscoring this is the ABA’s accreditation standard that at least 75% of a law school’s test-taking graduates…
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NY Times: How to Tax AI
New York Times DealBook: Everyone Wants to Tax A.I. The Big Disagreement: How?, by Peter Coy: Artificial intelligence is making some people rich and others feel left out. Unsurprisingly, then, proposals to tax A.I. for the benefit of the public are multiplying like the fingers on an A.I.-generated hand. Some make sense. Others, not so…
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A Majority of Law Professors Say Legal Education Is Heading in the Wrong Direction
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Free Expression in a Climate of Self-Censorship: A National Survey of American Law Faculty: Executive Summary. This report presents findings from a national survey of 1,959 law school faculty at 192 American Bar Association (ABA) approved law schools in the United States, conducted by the Foundation for Individual…
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Columbia Journal Of Tax Law Publishes New Issue
The Columbia Journal of Tax Law has published a new issue (Vol. 17, No. 1 (Fall 2025)): Jeremy Bearer-Friend (George Washington) & Sarah Polcz (UC-Davis), Sharing the Algorithm: The Tax Solution to Generative AI, 17 Colum. J. Tax L. 1 (2025) (reviewed by Assaf Harpaz (Georgia) here): Tax policy offers a core tool for mitigating…
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A Sudden Epiphany Showed Johns Hopkins Professor the Limits of Medicine (and the Abundance of God)
Washington Post Op-Ed: A Sudden Epiphany Showed a Johns Hopkins Physician the Limits of Medicine, by John V. Campo, (Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine): As an academic physician, trained first in pediatrics and then psychiatry, a field highly skeptical of religious faith, I was unprepared for a transcendent…
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Righteous Anger Submits to God
Christianity Today: Why (and When) It’s Okay for Christians to Get Angry, by Hannah Miller King (Author, Feasting on Hope: How God Sets a Table in the Wilderness (2026)): Anger isn’t always a sin, and suppressing anger isn’t always a virtue. … In 2025, Oxford University Press’s word of the year was rage bait. People often…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Pope Leo on AI: Magnifica Humanitatis
New York Times, Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical: The document marks a powerful foray by the leader of the Roman Catholic Church into the debate about the misuse or overuse of artificial intelligence. New York Times Op-Ed: Pope Leo Isn’t Standing Athwart the Singularity, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should…
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WaPo: ‘Advanced Colorectal Cancer Has Strengthened My Faith’
Washington Post Op-Ed: Cancer May Take My Life. Here’s What a Hymn Made Me See, by Megan Basham: As a Christian, I wish I could say I received my 2024 diagnosis of early-onset advanced colorectal cancer in a beatific fashion, battling fear and grief with the time-honored spiritual weapons of prayer, fasting and scripture reading.…
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Helfand: Why the Ten Commandments Don’t Belong in Public Schools
Dispatch Faith: Why the Ten Commandments Don’t Belong in Public Schools, by Michael Helfand (Pepperdine): Church-state separation is on the retreat at the Supreme Court—and with good reason. The once-dominant “wall of separation” metaphor never quite fit the nation’s constitutional tradition or historical practice. From Founding-era practices like legislative prayer and military chaplains to later…
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Projected 2027-28 U.S. News Law School Rankings: 10-Month Employment Rate
In the current 2026-27 methodology, employment counts 33% in the overall ranking: Outcomes 10 months after graduation (weighted 33%): This measures the extent to which graduates obtain the most in-demand jobs – namely those that are long term, full time and requiring (or taking advantage of) bar passage. Graduates with full-time, long-term, school-funded fellowships earned…
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Zhang: The Forgotten Attribution Power
Alex Zhang (Emory), The Forgotten Attribution Power, 135 Yale L.J. 923 (2026): Economic inequality stands at record levels, and constitutional law haunts egalitarian reform. In 2024, the Supreme Court decided the latest contest. Moore v. United States rebuffed an attempt to sharply limit the federal taxing power, as a razor-thin majority upheld Congress’s attribution of foreign…
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NY Times: UC-Berkeley Law School Cracks Down on AI
Following up on Mike Madison’s post, UC Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Policy: New York Times DealBook: A Law School Cracks Down on A.I., by Andrew Ross Sorkin: A.I. may be changing legal jobs. But Chris Hoofnagle, a professor at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law, doesn’t want the technology to transform legal education. “It’s just like…
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18 Year Old CPA | Law School Graduate to Pursue Tax LL.M. at Northwestern
Jimmy Chilimigras fast-tracked timeline: People, 18-Year-Old Student Becomes One of the Youngest to Ever Graduate from Law School:
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Searching for God in Silicon Valley
The Free Press: Searching for God in Silicon Valley, by Avital Balwit (Chief of Staff to Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic): The work of building frontier AI has brought us to the edge of where He might be. A running joke at Bay Area parties is that AI researchers are “building God.” This, of course,…