Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Legal Ed News
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Continued Growth in Legal Sector
From Karen Sloan of Reuters: The U.S. legal sector added 5,100 jobs in June, pushing legal employment to an all-time high for the third straight month, according to figures released on Thursday by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Karen Sloan, US Legal Sector Jobs Continued to Climb in June, July 2,…
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Law School Debt Declining for Third-Year Lawyers
A piece in Law.com summarizing findings of a new NALP study that was featured on TaxProfBlog yesterday: Average debt loads for third-year lawyers decreased for the third year in a row, according to a recent NALP Foundation study of employment outcomes and satisfaction for the law school class of 2022. . . . Third-year lawyers…
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NY Times: Law Firm Associate Salaries Jump Higher (First Year: $235,000)
New York Times DealBook: Salaries For Law Grads Jump Higher, by Elizabeth Olson: Big law firms are enjoying staggering upticks in profitability after years of consolidation and double-digit billing rate increases. That has led to eye-popping compensation for top partners despite concerns that artificial intelligence tools could disrupt the industry. Now the elite firms are again ratcheting up…
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National Jurist Launches Law School Excellence Awards
The National Jurist is launching the inaugural Law School Excellence Awards to recognize administrators, offices and programs that have made a meaningful difference in the student experience. You can offer nominations of those whom you admire or had the greatest impact on you at this link.According to the magazine, and unlike traditional rankings, these awards…
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Debate Over Accreditation Intensifies as States Push Changes
The latest from Karen Sloan at Reuters on the debates around ABA law school accreditation: With three states sidelining the American Bar Association in lawyer licensing over the past year and more poised to follow, ABA defenders on Monday warned that ending reliance on the organization’s law school oversight will hurt students, graduates, law schools…
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Fromer & Lemley: “State Supreme Courts Can Resolve Early Legal Recruiting Mess”
Jeanne Fromer (NYU) & Mark Lemley (Stanford): State Supreme Courts Can Resolve Early Legal Recruiting Mess (Bloomberg Law) Law firms now hire people for summer jobs 18 months in advance; in practice, they are hiring first-semester 1Ls for full-time jobs that won’t start for almost three years. State supreme courts can help fix this situation.…
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NY Times: Congress Should Reform Endowment Tax to Incentivize More Wealthy Colleges to Expand Access to Working- and Middle-Class Students
New York Times Op-Ed: A Bold Idea to Open Up Elite Colleges, by James S. Murphy (Fellow, Class Action) & Ryan Cieslikowski (Co-Founder & Director, Class Action): Princeton recently waived tuition for most students from families making up to $250,000 a year. Reporting in The Daily Princetonian suggests that this move may have removed the university from…
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UDC names Angela Gilmore Dean
Congratulations to the University of the District of Columbia’s David A. Clarke School of Law for removing the “interim” from Angela Gilmore’s title and naming her the permanent dean. Dean Gilmore has had a distinguished career in leadership at UDC; as senior accreditation counsel for the American Bar Association; as associate dean for academic affairs…
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FAMU Law Appoints Simone Marstiller as Dean
From the announcement: Florida A&M University (FAMU) has appointed Simone Marstiller, J.D., as dean of FAMU College of Law, effective July 1, 2026. Marstiller brings more than two decades of distinguished leadership experience spanning the judiciary, state government, regulatory affairs, and legal practice. Her appointment reflects the University’s commitment to academic excellence, student success, and…
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A Conversation on the Accreditation of Law Schools
National Experts will convene (virtually) to examine ABA Accreditation and discuss the future of legal education. The webinar is hosted by the Houston Bar Association on Monday, June 29, 2026, from 2:00-5:00 p.m. Central Time. It involves “fifteen leaders in legal education, including Kellye Y. Testy, CEO and executive director of the Association of American…
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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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Yale Grad, Who Left Practice After Bipolar Diagnosis and Joined Alabama Law Faculty, Publishes Book on Mental Health
ABA Journal, Mental Health Law Becomes This Law Prof and Author’s Focus After Walking ‘Through the Fire’: The most dangerous moments of Fredrick Vars’ life guided his career path. The first came in fall 2004, when he was a third-year associate at a law firm then known as Miller Shakman & Beem in Chicago. Just days…
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After Being Renewed For Another 5-Year Term in November, USC Dean Resigns Days Before Faculty No-Confidence Vote on B-School’s ‘Downward Trajectory’
Poets&Quants, USC Marshall Dean Geoffrey Garrett To Step Down Ahead Of Planned No-Confidence Vote: Seven months ago, Geoffrey Garrett appeared firmly in control of one of the nation’s most prominent business schools. In November, the University of Southern California announced that Garrett would serve a second five-year term as dean of the Marshall School of…
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American Constitution Society Convention
ACS opened its 25th anniversary convention at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. Thursday evening with a panel emphasizing the role of State Attorneys General in defending the rule of law. Moderated by former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Kristen Clarke (far left), the panel featured California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta, Minnesota’s Attorney…
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LSAC & NALP Report: Impact of Accelerated Big Law Recruitment
NALP and Law School Admission Council (LSAC) examine the impact of accelerated Big Law recruiting on first-year law students in a new report. You can find the report here and an introduction to it can be found on the LSAC website. From NALP Executive Director Nikia Gray: “To date, conversations about accelerated recruiting have been…
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A Majority of Law Professors Say Legal Education Is Heading in the Wrong Direction
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Free Expression in a Climate of Self-Censorship: A National Survey of American Law Faculty: Executive Summary. This report presents findings from a national survey of 1,959 law school faculty at 192 American Bar Association (ABA) approved law schools in the United States, conducted by the Foundation for Individual…
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Lunar et al.: GradeLegal: Automated Grading for German Legal Cases
Abdullah Al Zubaer (U. Passau), Lorenz Wendlinger (Deggendorf Inst. Tech.), Simon Alexander Nonn (U. Passau), Michael Granitzer (U. Passau) & Jelena Mitrović (U. Passau), GradeLegal: Automated Grading for German Legal Cases, arXiv:2605.21076 (cs) (May 20, 2026):
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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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Law Jobs: Historic High for US Legal Jobs; NALP Podcast
Lots happening in the legal market. An interesting piece by Karen Sloan on the historic high of legal markets jobs in May suggesting “that the rapid adoption of legal AI tools has not yet impacted staffing, even as experts predict it may in the near future.” From Reuters: The U.S. legal sector posted another historic…
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Law Deans and Principles of Professional Independence
Stories in the ABA Journal and Law.com cover a recent letter sent by former and current law deans to “former judges John E. Jones III, from the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, and Shira A. Scheindlin, from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, who led the…
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Projected 2027-28 U.S. News Law School Rankings: First-Time Bar Passage
In the current 2026-27 U.S. News Law School Rankings Methodology, first-time bar passage counts 18% in the overall ranking: Bar passage rate for first-time test-takers (18%): U.S. News used its treatment of bar passage rates to incorporate all graduates who took the bar for the first time, not just those from the state with the most…
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A Law School Dean, a Secret Recording, and Questions That Linger
Following up on last Sunday’s post, UC-Berkeley Law School Cracks Down on AI: Chronicle of Higher Education, A Dean, a Secret Recording, and Questions That Linger: Erwin Chemerinsky on AI, DEI, and that video that won’t go away. Last month, the law school at the University of California at Berkeley released a terse new AI…
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Touro Law to Expand from New York to Montana
“Touro University to Establish a Law School in Great Falls, Montana // Innovative Hybrid Program Designed to Address Critical Attorney Shortage in Montana” Press release from Touro University. Coverage via the ABA Journal: The program, which aims to launch its first cohort in August 2027, will combine in-person instruction with online coursework, aiming to attract…
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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…