Author: Paul Caron
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Pickleball and Faith
Christianity Today: Blessed Are the Pickleball Players, by David Zahl (Author, The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World (How to Overcome Burnout, Perfectionism, and Life’s Overwhelming Demands by Embracing Grace, Acceptance, and Peace) (2025)): On our way to church every weekend, my family and I pass two sets of tennis courts,
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Preview Of The 2026-27 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Overall
Derek Muller (Notre Dame), Updated Projected 2026-2027 USNWR Law School Rankings (To Be Released April 2026 Or So): The updated 509 data from the American Bar Association discloses a good deal of public information about law school admissions and law school faculty that is ultimately used in the USNWR law school rankings. We now have about 75% of the information
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Preview Of The 2026-27 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Employment
In the current 2025-26 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. Maximum credit was assigned for graduates with school-funded fellowships
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Preview Of The 2026-27 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Ultimate Bar Passage
In the current 2025-26 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 must pass a bar exam within two
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Preview Of The 2026-27 U.S. News Law School Rankings: First-Time Bar Passage
In the current 2025-26 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, and not just those from the state with the most test-takers. This de-emphasized the impact
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Preview Of The 2026-27 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Admissions
In the current 2025-26 methodology, law school admissions count 10% in the overall ranking: Rank School Accept. Rate Rank UGPARank LSATRank Weighted Rank 1 Chicago 7 3 2 2.90 2 Yale 1 5 2 3.10 3 Harvard 6 5 2 3.60 4 Virginia 8 2 5 4.10 5 Stanford 2 5 5 4.70 6 Wash. U.
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The Top 100 Legal Scholars of 2025
Rob Willey (George Mason) & Melanie Knapp (George Mason), The Top 100 Legal Scholars of 2025: Traditional legal scholarship rankings rely almost exclusively on career-long publication metrics, a method that inherently favors decades-old articles and often obscures the authors producing the most impactful research today. This article presents an alternative: a ranking of the 100
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Goldin & Liscow: When Should the Legal System Help Redistribute Income?
Jacob Goldin (Chicago) & Zachary D. Liscow (Yale), When Should the Legal System Help Redistribute Income?:, 93 U. Chi. L. Rev. 393 (2026): In this Essay, we consider when legal rules should be efficient and when they should not. We focus on conditions that can cause the socially optimal legal rule to diverge from the
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Bipartisan House Bill Would Expand Professional Degrees Eligible for Maximum Federal Student Loans to Include Accounting, Business, Education, and Nursing, But Not Law (MLS or LLM)
Inside Higher Ed, Lawmakers and Universities Push Back on Loan Caps: Hundreds of lawmakers have joined dozens of university leaders and academic trade associations in urging the Department of Education to amend its new regulations on federal student loans, arguing the current rule will deter students from pursuing high-demand degree programs and thus exacerbate dire
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Colleges (and Law Schools) Await Looming IRS Guidance on Race and Admissions
Bloomberg Tax, Colleges Await Looming IRS Guidance on Race and Admissions: Private colleges and universities with programs aimed to benefit racial minorities are girding themselves for new rules governing their tax-exempt status after a year of increased scrutiny by President Donald Trump. The administration, which plans to issue guidance in the next year, has cracked down on what it
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Disciplining the Dragons Within Us: Spiritual Formation and the Healing of Our Hearts
Christianity Today: The Dragons Within, by Haley Byrd Wilt: In Scripture, dragons—these great beasts we humans can’t help but dream about (or have nightmares about) from time to time—are associated with evil and chaos. And in the works of the original Inklings, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, dragons remind us of those corners of ourselves
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Western Civilization, Faith, and Great Books
The Dispatch: How to Teach a Great Tradition, by Jessica Hooten Wilson (Pepperdine): Both worshipping and villainizing the West does our students—and our societies—a disservice. On the issue of “Western civilization,” I would like to, in pursuit of fairness and truth, say something that offends everyone. As the American writer Walker Percy once joked, “What
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China’s Crackdown on Christians—and Their Defiant Faith
Christianity Today, China’s Crackdown on Christians—and Their Defiant Faith: John Piper’s sermons are often memorable, but one in particular has been seared in my mind ever since I first listened to it five or so years ago. I can still vividly hear his awestruck voice reading this passage from Hebrews 10: But recall the former
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The Top 100 Law Schools, Based On 5-, 10-, And 15-Year Rolling Average U.S. News Rankings
Bradley A. Areheart (Tennessee), The Top 100 Law Reviews: A Reference Guide Based on Historical USNWR Data: The best proxy for how other law professors react and respond to publishing in main, or flagship, law reviews is the US News and World Report (USNWR) rankings. This paper utilizes historical USNWR data to rank the top
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Silver: Tax-tualism
Benjamin Silver (Davis Polk, New York; Ph.D. 2024, Chicago; J.D. 2021, Yale), Tax-tualism, 111 Minn. L. Rev. ___ (2027): Textualism has long bedeviled tax law. Many longstanding tax anti-abuse doctrines lack clear textual footing and therefore appear vulnerable in an era that prioritizes statutory text. This threat has sharpened in the wake of Loper Bright
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AccessLex Helps Law Students Who Have Maximized Federal Loans to Secure Private Loans
Law.com, AccessLex Launches Tool to Help Law Students Navigate Private Lending: With new student loan caps coming into place on July 1, AccessLex Institute launched the AccessLex Private Loan Exchange to assist law schools and students with private lending, the organization announced Thursday (press release). The administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed last summer,
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Netherlands to Embark on Real-World Test of Mark-to-Market Taxation at Scale
Bloomberg Tax, Dutch Unrealized Gains Tax Is a Surprise Reform: The Netherlands didn’t set out to tax unrealized gains. It arrived there because its highest court invalidated a more modest policy of taxing “assumed” investment returns. Lawmakers were left with a multibillion-euro revenue hole and few legally viable ways to fill it. Their solution was
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Ben Sasse: Mortality, Meaning, and the Future of America
Following up on my previous post, Ben Sasse: Death, Hope, and Joy: Public Discourse: On Dying Well: Ben Sasse and the Vocation of Suffering, by Christopher O. Tollefsen (South Carolina; Author, Killing and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press 2026)): February is a good month to write, read, and think about death and dying. It is
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NY Times Op-Ed: ‘The Testament of Ann Lee’ Broke My Heart
New York Times Op-Ed: A Movie About America Broke My Heart, by David French (Author, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation (2020)): I couldn’t stop blinking back tears, and I couldn’t understand why. I’d just walked out of a movie called “The Testament of Ann Lee.” Lee was the founder of the American Shakers,
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AI and Faith
Following up on my previous posts: Russell Moore (Christianity Today), Your Understanding of Calling Is About to Change Radically: You don’t have to seek God’s will for your career anymore. I’m mostly joking, but not entirely. We must always seek God’s will. But what we meant by this for most of our lives is about
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Rodriguez: Law School Deans and Agentic AI
Daniel B. Rodriguez (Northwestern), Law School Deans as Cheerleaders, and the Delicate Marketing Dance, Part I: The Case of Agentic AI: Times in the AI world are changing, and fast. The latest iterations of AI are described as “agentic.” Tech companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are developing tools that are notably autonomous, able to engage in
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Love: Taxing Complexity
Michael Love (Columbia), Taxing Complexity: Complex business structures have overwhelmed U.S. tax enforcement, leaving trillions of dollars of business activity beyond the reach of meaningful oversight. This article develops a new theoretical framework to understand and address the social costs of this complexity, identifying two distinct channels of harm. Not only does complexity shield a
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The Rise of Law Profs’ Amicus Briefs: How Academic Voices Shape Supreme Court Decisions
Adam Feldman (Empirical SCOTUS), The Rise of Scholars’ Amicus Briefs: How Academic Voices Shape Supreme Court Decisions: [Supreme Court] Justices increasingly turn to scholar briefs not merely for doctrinal synthesis—a traditional function of academic amici—but for empirical claims, historical reconstruction, and comparative constitutional analysis that shapes the Court’s understanding of fundamental legal questions. These submissions
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NY Times Op-Ed: Ash Wednesday and the Burden of Living Your Beliefs
New York Times Op-Ed: Ash Wednesday and the Burden of Living Your Beliefs, by Christopher Beha (Author, Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer (2026)): On Ash Wednesday, I’ll join millions throughout the world in fasting, abstaining from meat and receiving ashes on my forehead, along with the reminder that