Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Books
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Book of the Week
Rachel Shelden, Associate Professor of History at Penn State, is out this week with an important new account of the Supreme Court’s early history in which, she demonstrates, members of the Court felt free to participate in political affairs that strike many modern sensibilities as entirely inappropriate. Equally important, in The Political Supreme Court: A…
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Book of the Week
The tenth edition of Brian Bix’s ‘canonical text, Jurisprudence: Theory and Context, introducing students to the basics of jurisprudence, is out now in the UK and due in the U.S . from Carolina Academic Press in March 27. If you teach in this area, consider it as a great vehicle to acquaint your students with…
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Grisham Strikes Again
When a best-selling author (and this is literal, not hyperbole) titles a book, The Law Student, readers of TaxProf Blog can’t help but be curious. This is a mini-book, just 24 pages of prequel to Grisham’s new thriller, The French Illusion. I’m daring you not to get hooked.
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Book of the Week
K. Sabeel Rahman, Professor of Law at Cornell and former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory affairs during the Biden Administration, offers his latest monograph Remaking the State: A New Blueprint for American Democracy. As the book’s title suggests, Professor Rahman seeks to transform how administrative agencies function, breaking the mold of opaque,…
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Book of the Week
Long acclaimed as one of the foundational texts introducing students to a variety of reasoning techniques and helping them understand how judges decide cases, Reason in Law has been updated for a tenth edition due out this month from the University of Chicago Press. A new foreword by Princeton icon, Kim Lane Scheppele introduces us…
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Book of the Week
We all know that our nation confronts dramatic levels of wealth inequality that threaten to leave the Gilded Age in the dust. So who are these people who now possess fortunes that would leave kings of old aching with envy and what do they plan for our future? That’s the topic seized by longtime journalist…
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Book of the Week
Following up on his insightful and controversial testimony before President Biden’s Commission on the Supreme Court, Professor Nikolas Bowie has teamed with his Harvard Law School colleague Daphna Renan to provide us this week with Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People. The authors’ thoughtful critique of judicial review goes far…
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Book of the Week
Julie C. Suki, Leonard F. Manning Professor of Law at Fordham University in her new book The Shadow Court offers a novel approach to the U.S. Supreme Court’s current monopoly on constitutional interpretation. Prof. Suk suggests Congress create an additional constitutional court, what she calls a Shadow Court, that would rule on contested constitutional questions…
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Book of the Week
David Dyzenhaus, University Professor and Albert Abel Professor of Law at the University of Toronto offers this thoughtful new monograph from Cambridge University Press, In The War Against Law: What’s Wrong with Common Good Constitutionalism, Dyzenhaus sounds the alarm about where the ideology of an unchecked executive branch is truly headed. His examples are British…
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Book of the Week
Renowned historian, Kim Phillips-Fein is out with a new book exploring the longstanding counter tradition in U.S. history that rejects the premise of the Declaration of Independence and proudly proclaims that all men are NOT created equal. In Country of Lords, from W.W. Norton & Co., Professor Phillips-Fein, Robert Gardiner-Kenneth T Jackson Professor of History…
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Book of the Week
Our colleague, Kent Greenfield, Professor of Law at Boston College Law School has penned Secession due out this January from Harper Collins and available for pre-order now. The title is self-explanatory, as Professor Greenfield contends both that secession is a good idea and that it can be accomplished peacefully. This is a very tough sell.…
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Book of the Week
Daron Acemoglu, Nobel prize winner, and author of the renowned, Why Nations Fail adds to his formidable body of work, this new title, What Happened to Liberal Democracy, exploring how liberalism failed to adapt to its ascendancy as the world’s dominant political philosophy and thus may have inadvertently sewed the seeds of its own decline.…
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Book of the Week
Oxford University Press announces the publication of the second volume of Constitutional Democracy in Crisis edited by our colleagues, Mark Graber (Maryland), Mark Tushnet (Harvard), Sanford Levinson (Texas), and Antonia Barragia (University of Milan). You can find the table of contents here. It’s a star-studded line-up addressing the crucial issues of our time. A must…
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Book of the Week
Martin Krygier, Gordon Samuels Professor of Law and Social Theory at the University of New South Wales.has penned an erudite analysis of conventional approaches to the Rule of Law. Available reviews of Tempering Power suggest Krygier has presented a compelling case that the Rule of Law can only be understood in context and that we…
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Book of the Week
I followed the 2025 election for Chair of the Democratic National Committee quite closely because my son conducted a statement candidacy urging dramatic change in how the party functions, particularly in how it raises and spends money. Ken Martin, who won the contest, is a passionate defender of working people and has delivered an extraordinary…
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Book of the Week
Great books often begin with great questions. My wonderful colleague, Libby Adler, started with this one: “How might a socialist jurisdiction “do” lgbtq legal advancement differently from a jurisdiction, such as the US, where legal advocates have relied heavily on liberal rights to achieve formal equality but have done far less to economically destratify the…
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Book of the Week
During the first week of June, thanks to a recommendation from Vermont Law Professor (and my former colleague) Alexandra Meise, I had the privilege of attending the National Security Seminar at the U.S. Army War College. While there I attended a lecture delivered by and several discussion sessions led by Professor and Retired Lieutenant Colonel,…
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Book of the Week
Jennifer Gerarda Brown offers a novel entry into the crowded field of books designed to ease students’ path during the first year of law school. Not content merely to provide her own take on familiar issues, such as outlining, class notes, exam preparation, test-taking skills, and balancing the workload with a personal life that includes…
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Book of the Week
What better way to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence than to gather 50 Harvard Law School Faculty members to write 1000 word essays reflecting on the nation’s past, and its future. Congrats to Harvard Professors Sasha Natapoff and Guy-Uriel E. Charles for assembling America Unfinished, which is due July 7 from…
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Book of the Week
In Gerontocracy in America, Samuel Moyn, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale, brings us a timely and insightful analysis of how older Americans have gathered and retained wealth and power at the potential expense of creating opportunities for succeeding generations. Consider the most mundane example of senior discounts offered at so many…
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Book of the Week
Professor Jessica de Perio WIttman, Director of the Thomas J. Meskill Library at the the University of Connecticut School of Law and Beth G. Adelman, Director of the Law Library and Vice Dean for Legal Information Services at the University of Buffalo have been awarded the 2026 Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award by the…
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Book of the Week
Due out June 9, this upbeat tome from former State Senator and co-founder of The States Project, Daniel Squadron, enourages legal reformers to focus on state governments as the most fertile source of progressive change as we head into our next 250 years. I’m curious how Squadron feels even the most savvy state can achieve…
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Book of the Week
It’s not every day that a 94 year-old releases a new book. But I can’t wait to read this insider account of how judges make decisions from the judge I admired most from my time clerking at the Second Circuit in 1982-83. Early in my tenure I helped the judge for whom I clerked draft…
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Book of the Week
Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA and winner of the 2021 AALS Triennial Award for Lifetime Service to Legal Education is just out with Backtalker: An American Memoir from Simon and Schuster. It tells her personal story and explores the experiences that helped shape her insight into the concept of intersectionality for…
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Book of the Week
Most readers of this blog are familiar with the devastating impact that makers and prescribers of opiates have had on the fabric of life in the United States. In Rehab: An American Scandal, Marshall Project journalist, Shoshanna Walter, calls our attention to the flip side of the coin. Once people have become dependent on addictive…