Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Law School
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Legal Education Existentialism, No. 2
In Legal Education Existentialism, No. 1, earlier today, I asked out loud: “What if artificial intelligence is an existential challenge to current systems of training lawyers, rather than a moment in technological evolution that calls for institutional resilience and adaptation?” I’ll be honest up front. I have my suspicions and my biases, but I do…
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Legal Education Existentialism, No. 1
News from Austin: Dean Bobby Chesney at the University of Texas (UT) School of Law circulated a long-ish memo the other day that lays out a mostly clear-eyed, common-sense view of how artificial intelligence technologies and systems ought to be folded into the legal education program at that law school. Here at TaxProf, Kevin Johnson…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: A Next-Gen Bar-Style Activity to Prepare Students for AI-Enhanced Law Practice
Two major challenges are hitting legal education at the same time: the NextGen Bar Exam and AI. Both feel threatening. This post offers an alternative to the natural human reactions to threats: fight, flight, or freeze. Instead, I propose combining the two, AI and a NextGen Bar testing format, to create a teaching tool for…
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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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Legal Education’s Greatest Hits Revisited
The editors of the Journal of Legal Education, now housed at UCIrvine and New York Law School, had the great idea of inviting today’s law faculty members to look back on some of the most influential articles published in the JLE over the past 40 years. These reflections are collected in a forthcoming double issue,…
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Faculty Focus: Building Psychological Safety in College Classrooms Through Cooperative and Experiential Learning
Dr. Ana Figueroa (Faculty Focus), Building Psychological Safety in College Classrooms Through Cooperative and Experiential Learning (June 10, 2026). This article, filled with insights and evidentiary data from a study the author conducted. She persuasively explains how cooperative learning experiences and experiential learning can help create psychological safety for our students, which Dr. Figueroa defines…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: Take Your Model Answers to the Next Level with Cognitive Think-Alouds
This week’s teaching tidbit addresses a technique for helping your students grow their analytical skills after they have completed a formative assessment. Many law professors provide model answers or issue outlines for midterm essay exams so that their students get a clear understanding of expectations. Many others provide, with the students’ consent, the answers of…
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Legal Writing Awards & 22nd LWI Conference
Each year, the Legal Writing Institute presents several national awards for contributions to legal writing. Last week, the University of Oregon announced that Prof. Rebekah Hanley (Oregon Law) had received the Legal Writing Institute’s (LWI) 2026 Mary S. Lawrence Innovation Award. This followed an announcement earlier in the year that Tamara Herrera (ASU Law) had…
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Has AI Killed Higher Education?
Owen Yingling, a writer and editor for the New Critic and a philosophy student at the University of Chicago has penned this provocative essay concerning the effect of Artificial Intelligence on the modern university. He calls it The Great Zombification as a way to signal that universities where professors are delivering AI-written lectures to students…
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Law Professors Prefer AI Answers
In a rigorous study aimed at determining whether AI has progressed to where it can navigate the sort of critical thinking required for legal education Stanford Law Professor Julian Nyarko, along with co-authors, Yale Law Professor Sarath Sanga and Stanford Liftlab’s Researcher, Alenjandro Salinas, have reached some potentially unsettling conclusions. Using a clever research design,…
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Touro Law Center to Establish New Campus in Montana
From one of the articles covering the announcement: Touro University Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center has received approval from the American Bar Association to establish a law school campus in Great Falls, Montana, and will start recruiting and enrolling for the inaugural cohort to begin in August 2027. The Great Falls campus of Touro Law…
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Prof. Lawsky’s Entry-Level Hiring Report (2025-2026)
Lots of data available in Sarah Lawsky‘s Entry-Level Hiring Report (lasted edited 05/31/26). From the report, “there were 105 tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools reported, at 75 different law schools.” How does 105 reported hires compare to past years? As the report indicates “Consistent with the last few years. The average number of hires…
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New Law Teacher’s Workshop
Later this week, AALS will host its annual Workshop for New Law Teachers in Washington, D.C. From the program description: The Workshop for New Law Teachers is an opportunity for faculty who have been teaching for three years or less to build networks, establish mentors, and share their experiences, questions, and concerns as new academics…
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Teaching Tidbit: Respond to the Email You WISH Your Student Had Sent
This week’s teaching tidbit shares a lesson that Professor Susan Keller of Western State College of Law taught me. Professor Keller, my first law professor mentor, gave me brilliant advice for responding constructively to an angry student email. Professor Keller taught me to respond to the version of the email I wish the student had sent. Many…
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The Stories Behind the Cases
In a forthcoming article in the Journal of Legal Education, St John’s Professor Ashley B. Armstrong offers a systematic approach to what has long been understood as a gap in traditional law school courses. Presenting what she calls “the contextual case method”, Professor Armstrong doesn’t merely highlight the importance of expanding case analysis to include…
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Firm Foundations: Bold Aspirations
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/opinion/big-law-legal-system.html?unlocked_article_code=1.l1A.TtbU.I15UYo0f0bKq&smid=url-share I suppose we should all be reading what the NYTimes is featuring about many members of our profession. Our author, Matthew Wollin appears not to have paid attention at NYU Law School, which has one of the top legal writing programs in the nation. I’m sure his teachers explained quite carefully that the presentation…
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Teaching Tidbit: Write a Great Syllabus, Part II
This week’s teaching tidbit takes up where last week’s post left off. Both posts suggest ways you can draft syllabi that advance goals common among us, i.e., creating a welcoming, inclusive culture, encouraging students, advancing a culture of constructive disagreement, communicating our high expectations, and demonstrating our passion for our subjects and for student success.…
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Cult of Pedagogy: Growth Discourse
Jennifer Gonzalez, Cult of Pedagogy, Growth Discourse: A Framework for Discussing Hard Topics with Students (December 7, 2025). This article offers concrete suggestions for facilitating conversations about challenging topics drawing on the work of the School for Ethics and Global Leadership. It details four strategies for facilitating hard conversations: creating a community where all students…
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UNC Law Appoints New Dean
Adding to a recent post on law school dean appointments and reappointments, Andy Hessick has been named dean of the UNC Law (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). From the announcement: Andy Hessick, who has served as interim dean of UNC School of Law since September 2025, has accepted the role on a permanent basis, effective…
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Why Commercial Law
On behalf of the ABA’s Commercial Law Education Task Force, Professors Anthony Palermo (Stetson), Kara Bruce (Univ. of North Carolina) and Laura Coordes (Arizona State) have posted to SSRN an open letter written to deans of U.S. Law Schools urgin them to make it a priority to offer commercial law courses, including those covering secured…
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Edutopia: 28 Ways to Quickly Check for Understanding
Daniel Leonard, 28 Ways to Quickly Check for Understanding (May 19, 2024) The subheading offers a preview of the great ideas to follow: From sketching comics to drafting tweets, these fun—and fast—ways to check for understanding are creative and flexible. My four favorites are: asking students to write a six-word headline, create quiz questions, write…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: Write a Syllabus that Sets You Up for a Great Semester
This week’s and next week’s teaching tidbits focus on creating syllabi that advance goals common among us, i.e., creating a welcoming, inclusive culture, encouraging students, advancing a culture of constructive disagreement, communicating our high expectations, and demonstrating our passion for our subjects and for student success. In addition, as you might expect, these two tidbits…
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AI and Legal Education
A thoughtful piece by Dean Danielle Conway (Penn State Dickinson Law), Dean Richard Moberly (Univ. of Nebraska College of Law) and AALS Executive Director Kellye Testy in Bloomberg Law. A small excerpt: AI adoption has serious risks, including lack of transparency, the importance of disclosure, and disparate economic impact. But the truth, and the landscape…
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“Claude for Legal” and Conventional Legal Education
Anthropic’s brand new “Claude for Legal” suite of AI tools for law and lawyers accelerates – dramatically – the pace of AI technology deployment in and around law schools. Seth Chandler (University of Houston) has a characteristically thorough (and completely geeked out) review of how law students and law professors (especially clinicians) will find abundant…
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ABA Council Votes to End Diversity Standard
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/american-bar-association-votes-eliminate-dei-rule-law-schools-2026-05-15 The prior rule, which has been suspended since February 2025, required ABA accredited law schools to consider diversity in recruitment, admissions and student programming. Of course this decisions comes with the backdrop of pressure from the Trump Administration, which opposes diversity, equity and inclusion as factors in accreditation and has threatened to remove the…