Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Book Club
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Bill Belichick: The Four Words Every Coach (And Dean) Needs To Say More Than Anyone Else On Their Team
Wall Street Journal Essay, How to Win Six Super Bowls? Don’t Relax After the First One. (Adapted From Bill Belichick, The Art of Winning: Lessons From My Life in Football (2015)): Sustained success, writes former New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, requires sticking with what you’ve practiced and being ready to admit your own…
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Blank & Osofsky: Introduction To Automated Agencies — The Transformation Of Government Guidance
Joshua D. Blank (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar) & Leigh Osofsky (North Carolina; Google Scholar), Introduction to Automated Agencies: The Transformation of Government Guidance (Cambridge University Press, 2025): Administrative agencies that are responsible for running federal government operations have increasingly turned to chatbots, virtual assistants, and other automated tools to offer guidance to the public about the law. Together,…
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The First IRS Commissioner: ‘The Most Consequential Public Figure Americans Have Never Heard Of’
Harold Holzer (Director, The Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute (Hunter College)), The First IRS Commissioner: ‘The Most Consequential Public Figure Americans Have Never Heard Of’ (reviewing Jeffrey Boutwell, Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy (2025)): America’s first IRS commissioner helped raise the vast sums needed to wage the Civil War and was a strong…
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NY Times: Can The Jesus Of History Support The Christ Of Faith?
New York Times Op-Ed: Can the Jesus of History Support the Christ of Faith?, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025)): The latest issue of The New Yorker includes an essay by Adam Gopnik, “We’re Still Not Done With Jesus,” on the scholarly debates about the origins of Christianity. In the piece, Gopnik positions himself…
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Why We Can’t Stop Talking About Jesus
The New Yorker Book Review: Why We Can’t Stop Talking About Jesus, by Adam Gopnik (reviewing Elaine Pagels (Princeton), Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus (2025)): One subject that never dies, and, more significantly, never bores, is the life and times of the first-century Jewish rabbi and martyr Jesus, whose followers founded a…
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How AI Can Help Colleges (And Law Schools) Kick Their Addiction To Consultants
Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed: How Colleges Can Kick Their Addiction to Consultants, by Hollis Robbins (University of Utah): American colleges are spending far too much on consulting firms. … They signal a fundamental crisis in higher-education leadership: the belief that external consultants, rather than internal expertise, hold the keys to institutional transformation. But 2025 will…
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Abraham Lincoln, The Civil War, And Faith
Wall Street Journal Book Review: Amanda Brickell Bellows (The New School; Google Scholar), Calling Heaven to the Union’s Cause (reviewing Richard Carwardine (Oxford), Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union (2025)): As a young man in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln was a religious skeptic. Raised in the Presbyterian Church, he would later decline to…
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Infanti: Taxation And Slavery In Colonial America
Anthony C. Infanti (Pittsburgh; Google Scholar), The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America (NYU Press 2025): The Human Toll documents how the American colonies used tax law to dehumanize enslaved persons, taxing them alongside valuable commodities upon their forced arrival and then as wealth-generating assets in the hands of slaveholders. Anthony C. Infanti examines…
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Blank & Osofsky: Automated Agencies: The Transformation Of Government Guidance
Joshua D. Blank (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar) & Leigh Osofsky (North Carolina; Google Scholar), Automated Agencies: The Transformation of Government Guidance (Cambridge University Press, 2025): Automated Agencies is the definitive account of how automation is transforming government explanations of the law to the public. Joshua D. Blank and Leigh Osofsky draw on extensive research regarding the federal government's…
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NY Times: The Malcolm Gladwell Of Conservative Christianity
New York Times: He Gave a Name to What Many Christians Feel, by Ruth Graham: I traveled to Carmel [Indiana] in February to talk with Mr. Renn about the ideas that had made him a new star in conservative Christian intellectual circles. Mr. Renn loves city life, and has lived in Manhattan, Chicago and Indianapolis.…
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What The Black Church Can Teach The Rest Of American Christianity
Christianity Today: What the Black Church Can Teach the Rest of American Christianity, Russell Moore (Editor-in-Chief), : Walter Strickland didn’t read a book from cover to cover until he was 18 years old. Books—from that first read, The Screwtape Letters, to Strickland’s latest work, Swing Low—have shaped his life. So, too, has the Black church. Strickland,…
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Why Christians Fast During Lent
Christianity Today Op-Ed: Why Christians Fast During Lent, by Phoebe Farag Mikhail (Author, Hunger for Righteousness: A Lenten Journey Towards Intimacy with God and Loving our Neighbor (2025)): Not every Christian tradition has continued … abstinence from meat, fish, and dairy in its practice of Lent, of course. Nonetheless, it’s important for all of us…
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CALI Seeks New Authors To Take Over And Update Three Tax Casebooks
The Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) is looking for new authors to take over and update the three tax casebooks in its eLangdell Bookstore. The books are free to download and use by anyone under a Creative Commons License. (Printed versions are available at cost.) Although the books are free, CALI negotiates a…
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Douthat: How I Lost My Faith In Atheism
Christianity Today Op-Ed: How I Lost My Faith in Atheism, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025): Late in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus confesses his crisis of Catholic faith to a close friend. The friend asks if he intends to become a Protestant. “I said…
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Saving The Subject: How I Found You When I Almost Lost Me
Cameron Fathauer (Schad Law (New Albany, IN); J.D. 2021, Indiana-Maurer), Saving the Subject: How I Found You When I almost Lost Me (2024): In his debut book, "Saving the Subject," Cameron Fathauer paints a spiritual odyssey following his traumatic brain injury with vividness and vulnerability, capturing both the weight of his physical trials and the…
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Brunson: Between The Temple And The Tax Collector — The Intersection Of Mormonism And The State
Sam Brunson (Loyola-Chicago; Google Scholar), Between the Temple and the Tax Collector: The Intersection of Mormonism and the State (University of Illinois Press 2025): The founding and development of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints run parallel to the rise of the modern tax system and administrative state. Samuel D. Brunson looks at…
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NY Times: The Best Argument Against Having Faith In God
New York Times Op-Ed: The Best Argument Against Having Faith in God, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025): Since last week’s newsletter offered a favorite argument for the existence of God, it’s only fair to balance the scales by considering a strong argument against religious faith, against the existence of some…
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Northwestern Hosts Book Event Today For Untaxed: The Rich, The IRS, And A New Approach To Tax Compliance
Northwestern hosts a book event for Joshua Blank (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar) and Ari Glogower (Northwestern; Google Scholar), Untaxed: The Rich, the IRS, and a New Approach to Tax Compliance (Cambridge University Press 2024). Sarah Lawsky (Northwestern; Google Scholar) will provide commentary. One of the most common complaints about the tax system in the United States…
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NY Times Op-Ed: My Favorite Argument For The Existence Of God
New York Times Op-Ed: My Favorite Argument for the Existence of God, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025): I think that the most compelling case for being religious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doctrines, that the universe was made for a…
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Super Bowl LIX: Football’s Lessons For America (Vince Lombardi)
The Free Press: Things Worth Remembering, by Charles Lane: “I sometimes wonder whether those of us who love football fully appreciate its great lessons,” said Vince Lombardi, in what friends and family called “the speech.” [What It Takes to Be #1: Vince Lombardi on Leadership] [Football] is a great game, a game of great lessons,…
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Graetz Presents The Power To Destroy: How The Antitax Movement Hijacked America Today At San Diego
Michael Graetz (Columbia; Google Scholar) presents The Power to Destroy—How The Antitax Movement Hijacked America (2024) at San Diego today as part of its Tax Speaker Series: The postwar United States enjoyed large, widely distributed economic rewards—and most Americans accepted that taxes were a reasonable price to pay for living in a society of shared…
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Lawless: The Miseducation Of America’s Elites
Ilya Shapiro (Manhattan Institute), Lawless: The Miseducation of America's Elites (2025): In the past, Columbia Law School produced leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now, it produces window-smashing activists. What happens when America’s top law schools stop believing in legal education?When protestors at Columbia broke into a building and created illegal encampments,…
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It’s Time For A New Era Of Christian Civility
Following on last Sunday's post, New York Times Op-Ed (David French): Why Are So Many Christians So Cruel?: Christianity Today Op-Ed: It’s Time for a New Era of Christian Civility, by Alexandra Hudson (Author, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves (2023)): Over the past few years, our society has continued…
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Yale Law School’s ‘Tiger Mom’ Roars Back
Following up on my previous post: Vanity Fair: What JD And Usha Vance Learned From Their ‘Tiger Mom’ At Yale Law School: Peter Savodnik (The Free Press), The Tiger Mother Roars Back: In January 2011, Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua was in the middle of her book tour, in her hotel room in Seattle, when…
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Pope Francis: There Is Faith In Humor
New York Times Op-Ed: There Is Faith in Humor, by Pope Francis (Co-Author, Hope: The Autobiography (Jan. 14, 2025)): Life inevitably has its sadnesses, which are part of every path of hope and every path toward conversion. But it is important to avoid wallowing in melancholy at all costs, not to let it embitter the…