Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Law School
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Access Lex Offers a New Ranking System Focused on Law Schools’ Contributions to Student Success
Access Lex, Catching What Rankings Miss: Evaluating Law Schools by Their Contribution to Student Success (8-13-26) Read the webpage and then click on the two-pager. For now, here is an excerpt from the webpage: Each spring, the release of new law school rankings prompts renewed scrutiny of institutional performance. In April 2026, the U.S. News &…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: When You Don’t Know the Answer
Last week, based on a question from a brilliant and very dedicated new colleague, I shared good and bad advice you can give to your students about how to successfully learn in your classes. This week’s topic comes from a different, brilliant, and very dedicated new colleague. This second colleague asked what to do if you…
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Increases in Law School Applications
Quite a bit of coverage over the increases in law school applications this past year. For a few examples: We’re just starting to see predictions for the coming year. Here’s how the ABA Journal described this past year’s cycle with a link to the LSAC data.: Law school applications are again reaching record high numbers,…
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Why Be an Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
Mary Algero, Associate Dean for Faculty Development and former Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Academic Affairs at Loyola University, New Orleans College of Law has taken time to provide a thoughtful account of why someone might wish to serve in the role of associate dean for academic affairs and how one might make good…
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Mock Job Talk Scheduling Poll
David Sella-Villa (South Carolina), Mock Job Talk Scheduling Poll Some candidates entering the U.S. legal academic market have a lot of people in their corner: mentors who read their job talk paper, colleagues who sit through practice runs, friends who explain what an appointments committee is really asking. Others go in without any of that.…
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Blaszczyk: “Field Notes from the U.S. Law Teaching Market”
Matt Blaszczyk (University of Georgia), Field Notes from the U.S. Law Teaching Market: The U.S. law teaching market is highly competitive and traditionally reliant on specific institutional signals. For non-traditional candidates, accessing the unwritten norms of this ecosystem can be challenging. This collection of notes functions as a strategic roadmap to demystify the process. It…
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Florida State College of Law Announces Finalists for Deanship
The names of finalists were released 24 hours prior to on campus interviews: William Magnuson (Texas A&M), Jake Linford (FSU), and Jeffrey Manns (GW).
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: (Bad and) Good Advice to Students
A brilliant and very dedicated new colleague asked me what advice he should give students about how they can do well in his class. That question inspired this blog post. My plan is to share four examples of what I regard as bad advice and, for each, suggest why I do not like the advice…
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Most Improved Law Schools for Employment
On the heels of the rankings of the “Top Law Schools for Technology Law,” (see Kevin Johnson’s post last week), the National Jurist recently released their analysis of most improved law schools for employment comparing the employment rates of the Classes of 2012-2014 with the Classes of 2023-2025. For students, one question towers above almost…
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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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Feds Move Against Diversity Scholarships
The U.S. government, via the Department of Labor, has long worked with the State of Minnesota to maintain a Website called CarrerOneStop, which, among other things, allows students to find a variety of available scholarship all in one place. Now, as reported in the Washington Post, the Federal Government is moving to end its relationship…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: Fears and Nightmares for Our Fall 2026 Classes
Next week, as you may know, I will once again be a full-time law professor after serving as a dean for twelve years, eight at my current home, McGeorge, and four at the Bowen Law School in Arkansas. I am as excited as I am nervous, and, to implement a recommendation from a dear friend,…
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Deep Thinking about AI Literacy-Related Outcomes
Drs. Veronika Hackl, Alexandra Elena Müller, Maximilian Sailer (Faculty of Social and Educational Sciences, University of Passau, Passau, Germany), The AI literacy heptagon: A structured approach to AI literacy in higher education, Computers and Education: Articial Intelligence 10 (2026). Abstract The integrative literature review addresses the conceptualization and implementation of AI Literacy (AIL) in Higher Education (HE) by examining recent…
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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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Pathways to Law Teaching Regional Workshops
A number of law schools have recently hosted regional workshops in preparation for the virtual Faculty Recruitment Conference that will be on held September 16-18, 2026 (during which participating schools will hold interviews with candidates). The Pathways to Law Teaching Regional Workshops, were hosted this year in six different regional markets or areas, including: (1) the…
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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…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: Hopes and Dreams for Our Fall 2026 Classes
As some of you know, in this semester, I return full time to the classroom after serving as a dean for twelve years, eight at my current home, McGeorge, and four at the Bowen Law School in Arkansas. I am as excited as I am nervous, and, to implement a recommendation from a dear friend,…
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An Interesting Approach to Solving the AI Misuse Conundrum Regarding Take-Home Projects
Jasper Roe (Durham University), Mike Perkins (British University Vietnam), & Louie Giray (Mapua University), Assessment twins: An approach for strengthening assessment validity in the age of generative AI (6-4-26). This article is worth a read and some consideration. For those of us who teach legal writing and upper-division writing seminars worry equally about learning and…
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Wendel, Should Law Schools Teach Responsible Use of AI?
Brad Wendel, Edwin H. Woodruff Professor of Law (Cornell Law School), Should Law Schools Teach Responsible Use of AI? (August 2, 2026). Wendel begins his substack with one word, “No.” I will mostly leave it to you to enjoy Wendel’s very readable prose, but I will excerpt one quote to give you a flavor: I…
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Luedeman on AI and Accommodations
Richard Luedeman (University of Baltimore) reached out to me following my recent post on law faculty innovating with AI policies and shared this forthcoming article: “The AI-Accommodation Dilemma in Legal Education” (forthcoming 33 Michigan Technology Law Review (2027)). The abstract: Two major trends are forcing American law schools to rethink their approach to learning assessments, and they…
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Leadership Education in Law Schools
As orientations loom for incoming JD students, Deans and others welcoming new cohorts are thinking of how to echo what they said to graduates last May and June: Lawyers are leaders. As almost all of us in legal education know, however, we talk the leadership talk but all too often fail to walk the leadership…
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No- and Low-Cost Law School Casebooks
It may be too late in the game for law professors to choose a new casebook for this Fall’s courses, but that has not stopped our colleagues from distributing recently what I can only call a deluge of announcements of new editions of old texts, and in some instances, new texts altogether. In almost every…
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U Conn Hiring for Three Positions
The University of Connecticut (UConn) School of Law seeks candidates for an open-rank clinical faculty position in its Legal Practice Program (“LP Program”), an open-rank clinical faculty position as Director of Academic Success and Bar Preparation, and a lateral position for the Thomas F. Gallivan, Jr. Chair of Real Property Law. All positions begin in…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: Teaching Using Multiple-Choice Questions
In last week’s blog post identifying 11 teaching technique alternatives to Socratic-style questions and lectures, I promised that, among other things, I would create a post that explores teaching using multiple choice questions. This post explores four such uses, but I start with a recommendation. How Students Should Communicate Their Answers. Regardless of which of the four uses…