Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Books
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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…
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Book of the Week
The incomparable Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, has assembled this thought-provoking collection of essays under the title Is Democracy Doomed? It’s just published. The many distinguished authors (I snuck in too) reflect broadly on the forces that have led to our current era of polarization and…
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Book of the Week
Northeastern paid tribute this month to retiring University Distinguished Professor of Law, Margaret Burnham. The event held in her honor was one of the most inspirational celebrations of a career that I have ever attended. Scholars shared tales of how Margaret’s work had led them to greater heights and deeper insights. Clients told stories of…
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Book of the Week
It’s one thing to criticize this or any President from the comfort of the faculty lounge. It’s quite another to lose one’s job and then deliver a detailed chronicle of concrete executive branch failings resulting in untold harm to innocent people around the world. That’s what Nicholas Enrich, a longtime civil servant at the U.S.…
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Book of the Week
What lessons should we draw from the fact that so many of our routine ways of building legal culture (e.g. powerful appellate courts; law schools as separate parts of universities) were created when formalism was the dominant paradigm for understanding how law works? Have we fully tackled how these institutions could best function now that…
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Who’s Woke Now
Elise Stefanik has penned a new book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities, which should attract our attention, if only because it represents her attempt to build upon her widely seen performance at congressional hearings that led to departures of prominent academic leaders. But what really…
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Book of the Week
Boston University Professor of Law, Aziza Ahmed, brings us this fascinating story of how the feminist movement played a key role in changing the shape of the fight against AIDS. She teases out complex interrelationships between social and scientific knowledge that illustrate how misconceptions can be overcome through sustained resistance. You can find the book…
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Book of the Week
Beth Macy, author of the widely acclaimed Dopesick, which tells the story of the pharmaceutical’s role in the opioid crisis, now brings us a searing memoir detailing her very personal story of how the hollowing out of America’s heartland has devastated her hometown and wreaked havoc with her family. Taking its title, Paper Girl, from…