Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Artificial Intelligence
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Three Challenges for Legal Education
Returning to this blog after a busy few weeks, here are links to material that might give law professors – and deans, and provosts – pause. These come in three clusters: budget (cuts), Generative AI (of course), and whether the world respects what higher education is producing, or will. I share these not because they…
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The Atlantic: All the Things You’re Not Allowed to Say in Texas
The Atlantic has a long read on politically motivated curriculum interventions that affect the 700,000 students at public universities in Texas. The lede examines Texas Tech’s “onerous and clumsy” use of AI to implement its curriculum restrictions, with faculty judgment displaced in part by what the author calls a “censorship bot.” Also discussed: low faculty…
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Why the Catholic Church Is AI Doom’s Most Formidable Foe
Following up on last Sunday’s post, New York Times: Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.: Dispatch Faith: Why the Catholic Church Is AI Doom’s Most Formidable Foe, by Claire Lehmann (Founding Editor, Quillette): Earlier this year, the cherub-faced technologist Christopher Olah led a delegation of Silicon Valley executives into the ancient…
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Anthropic Releases Law Student Plugin, Offers 4-Month Fellowship (Jan. 12-May 8) for Law Professors and Lawyers ($100,000–$167,000)
Paul Weitzel (Nebraska): Justin Curl (Anthropic):
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Lepore in the Chronicle: “Has Harvard Indeed Lost Its Mind?”
Jill Lepore (Harvard) has a new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State (2026). The Chronicle of Higher Education has a wide-ranging interview with Lepore on ideology, artificial intelligence, and the return of mysticism. And, of course, these ideas’ implications for higher education, including Lepore’s concerns about a technology-driven decline in student-faculty connection.…
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WaPo: AI and Christian Asceticism
Washington Post Awakenings: This Ancient Spiritual Practice May Be the Answer to AI, by Paul Kingsnorth (The Abbey of Misrule): [If] the arrival of AI raises spiritual questions — questions about the existence and nature of God — then a spiritual response is required. As AI rushes through all systems, upending everything from the water…
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NY Times: Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.
New York Times: Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them., by Elizabeth Dias: In a series of private meetings, the company consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models — and make the case that Claude could be conscious. One night in April, a leader of the artificial intelligence…
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Washington & Lee Requires AI Training Before 1L Classes Begin
Washington & Lee University School of Law has introduced a mandatory, one-credit course on ethical and effective AI use. The course is built around Harvey—which recently raised $550 million at a $15.5 billion valuation that’s quintupled since February 2025—and reaches students “[b]efore they read their first case or step into their first doctrinal classroom.” That…
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Time off to learn AI
Law Firms now giving lawyers time off to become familiar with AI and its uses for their practice. Law Schools need to catch up. Reuters has the story but the point is clear even if the link isn’t functioning.
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The Gospel According to Claude
The Free Press: The Gospel According to Claude, by Josh Code: Faith leaders are using AI to help research and outline their sermons. Where to draw the line depends on who you ask. … Roughly 24 percent of U.S. pastors use AI to help write or edit sermons, according to new data from the Barna…
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Lane Kiffin’s Use of ChatGPT for Legal Advice Nearly Got LSU Kicked Out of the SEC
ESPN, Inside the SEC’s Tangled Legal Battle With LSU and Lane Kiffin: As LSU and the SEC found themselves locked in an unprecedented game of legal chicken over coach Lane Kiffin’s plan to roster two former NFL players this season, Kiffin routinely reached out to his friend, attorney Tom Mars, for legal advice. When Mars…
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Is the AI Boom Hollowing Out Corporate Tax Receipts?
In September 2026, the Congressional Budget Office reported a 25% year-over-year decline in corporate tax receipts, based on the first eleven months of the 2026 federal fiscal year. The absolute eleven-month decline was $96 billion—from $390 billion in FY 2025 to $294 billion in FY 2026—and comes on top of a 15% annual decline from…
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Is AI a Substitute for or a Complement to Billable Hours?
Generative AI promises to streamline routine legal work. Nevertheless, BigLaw clients are buying more of their lawyers’ time. At Bloomberg Law, Roy Strom reports that demand for BigLaw attorneys’ time rose 4.2% in the first half of 2026, compared with an historic norm of about 1.5%. These numbers follow significant demand growth for law firms’…
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AI and Faith
Following up on my previous posts on AI and Faith (links below): New York Review of Books, Against Slop: An Interview with Meghan O’Gieblyn: “The whole field of AI alignment—ensuring that machine intelligence can peacefully coexist with humanity—grew out of the pervasive anxiety that we might create monsters.” This is, Meghan O’Gieblyn argues in our June…
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How Often Are Articles in T14 Law Reviews Written In Part By AI?
Julian Nyarko (Stanford), How Often Are Articles in Top Law Reviews Written In Part By AI?: Over the last few weeks, there has been some interesting discussion around the use of AI in the writing of law review articles, with views among legal scholars varying quite widely. To me, the question of whether AI use…
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Tax Advice and AI
Jay A. Soled (Rutgers) & Linda Galler (Hofstra), Tax Advice and AI, 100 Tul. L. Rev. 909 (2026): In the past, taxpayers’ choices in seeking guidance on tax return positions were limited to obtaining costly advice from trained tax professionals or conducting their own research in hopes of finding accurate answers. Either path might or…
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Law Schools Tell Students to Put AI Away
From the Financial Times, although describing the practices of only two law schools. These days, we are all struggling to balance the human and the machine in the workplace. Take the training of lawyers. Generative AI can already do much of the grunt work normally given to young, inexperienced attorneys, but if we let it,…
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McGinnis: AI and the Public Purpose of Legal Scholarship
John O. McGinnis (Northwestern Law), “The Scholar’s Telescope: AI and the Public Purpose of Legal Scholarship” The abstract: The controversy over artificial intelligence in legal scholarship exposes a deeper disagreement about what legal scholarship is for. This Essay argues that scholarship’s governing public purpose is to improve warranted public understanding of law and the reasons…
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Blackman: AI Freezes The Law Professor’s Scholarly Voice
Josh Blackman (South Texas), AI Freezes The Scholarly Voice: I recently attended a workshop about how law professor are using AI. One professor said that he has trained AI on his writing style by reviewing all of his past publications. Thus, any text generated by the AI will be in the same sort of style…
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NY Times: The AI Token Tax
New York Times DealBook, The A.I. Token Tax: When Bill Gates warned of the dangers posed by A.I. this week, he also weighed in on a somewhat obscure debate among politicians and economists about the best way to tax the technology. Gates suggested taxing A.I. tokens. This month, Representative Greg Casar of Texas, who chairs the Congressional Progressive…
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“The 2026 Top Legal Innovators in Academia”
The “National Law Review” has published a list of “The 2026 Top 50 Legal Innovators in Academia,” here. Who is a “legal innovator”? The NLR – and its sponsor, Wickard (“a specialized education and advisory firm operating at the intersection of law, artificial intelligence, ethics, and public policy”) writes: they are “educators, administrators, researchers, and…
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New Law Review Submission Analytics Tool from Georgetown Law
TaxProf Blog gets announcements. Here is an interesting one: Cece Worley, a 3L at Georgetown Law and Executive Editor of the Georgetown Law Journal, wrote to us to announce the launch of “Expecited.” The announcement says that Expecited is “a platform designed to make the law review submissions process more transparent and useful for legal…
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Do Law School AI Bans Teach the Wrong Lesson?
A piece from Donald Tobin and Samuel Irwin responding to UC Berkeley Law’s recently announced AI policy. Berkeley Law recently announced a new artificial intelligence (AI) policy that, absent a professor’s decision to opt out, bans almost all AI use in students’ coursework and exams. Other law schools may soon follow suit. These bans teach the wrong…
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ClioCon and Legal Education
ClioCon, a legaltech confab that is (I am told) a or even “the” must-attend annual industry conference, has added a “legal education” segment to its schedule this year. It’s an “Academic Summit,” as if the gathering is a pinnacle of some sort or a gathering of the educational elite. The “Academic Summit” takes place in…
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Frazier on AI for non-tech students
Kevin Frazier (University of Texas) posted this to LinkedIn, and with his permission I am copying it over here. I invited Kevin to draft a short intro. Here is his text. The LI post follows. There’s a shortage of scholars–junior and senior–studying AI governance. Many of the leading minds in the academy–both in law and…