Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Legal Ed Scholarship
-
Call for Participants: Half-Day Symposium Program
Here’s an open call for a Half-Day Symposium entitled, “Meeting the Moment: Reclaiming Academic Freedom, Democratic Governance, and the Values of Higher Education,” scheduled for Thursday, January 7, 2:35-5:25pm at the 2027 AALS Annual Meeting. I am pleased to be participating, the organizers have some terrific speakers already lined up, and they are looking to…
-
How Often Are Articles in T14 Law Reviews Written In Part By AI?
Julian Nyarko (Stanford), How Often Are Articles in Top Law Reviews Written In Part By AI?: Over the last few weeks, there has been some interesting discussion around the use of AI in the writing of law review articles, with views among legal scholars varying quite widely. To me, the question of whether AI use…
-
Journal of Legal Education: “Leadership and Character in the Law”
The Journal of Legal Education has published a new issue (Volume 74, Number 1), a symposium issue titled “Leadership and Character in the Law.” The issue is the product of a symposium held at Wake Forest University’s law school in March 2025, organized by Kenneth Townsend, Executive Director of Leadership and Character in the Professor…
-
McGinnis: AI and the Public Purpose of Legal Scholarship
John O. McGinnis (Northwestern Law), “The Scholar’s Telescope: AI and the Public Purpose of Legal Scholarship” The abstract: The controversy over artificial intelligence in legal scholarship exposes a deeper disagreement about what legal scholarship is for. This Essay argues that scholarship’s governing public purpose is to improve warranted public understanding of law and the reasons…
-
Law School Dean Tenure Shrinks to 2.8 Years Due to Financial Constraints and Strained Relationships With University Administration
ABA Journal, Financial Pressures Lead Law Deans to Leave Their Posts, New Study Finds: The average tenure for law school deans has shrunk from 10.3 years in the 1950s to 2.8 years since 2020—and financial pressures are largely to blame, according to a study published Wednesday by the Association of American Law Schools. … While 65.9% of…
-
How to Read a Legal Opinion
July winds down, and the fall semester will be on us before we know it. Always a good time to re-read Professor Orin Kerr’s (Stanford) introductory essay for law students explaining how to read a legal opinion. It’s among the best of the genre. It appeared in Green Bag, Autumn 2007, Volume 11, No. 1,…
-
Fagan: The Coming Law Review Shortage
Frank Fagan (South Texas), The Coming Law Review Shortage, 2025 U. Ill. L. Rev. Online 187: Today, law reviews sit near equilibrium: roughly 5,000 annual submissions for about 5,600 placements. Tomorrow, large language models are likely to drive output toward 8,000. The result is a systemic shortage of publication placements. Peer review will not emerge;…
-
Bellin: The High Cost of Law School Casebooks
Jeffrey Bellin (Vanderbilt), The High Cost of Law School Casebooks, 34 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 503 (2025): Commentators have forecasted the demise of high-priced commercial casebooks for two decades. Yet little has changed. This Symposium Essay explores the headwinds facing free and low-cost books in the law school casebook market. It suggests that…
-
Is AI’s Law School Exam Performance Plateauing?
Andrew Blair-Stanek (Maryland) & Donald B. Tobin (Maryland) et al., Is AI’s Law School Exam Performance Plateauing?: Last spring, we had OpenAI’s reasoning model o3 take our final exams, with the reasoning effort parameter set to “high,” and graded its answers on the same curve as our students. o3 got grades ranging from A+ to…
-
George, Yoon & Gulati: Stacking Federal Judicial Clerkships
Tracey E. George (Vanderbilt), Albert Yoon (Toronto) & Mitu Gulati (Virginia), Stacking the Deck: A federal judicial clerkship is a government-funded Golden Ticket that opens doors otherwise closed to most. This ticket grants entry to a one-year apprenticeship-an exclusive glimpse behind the judiciary’s gates that functions as a mentorship-rich fourth year of law school. Historically,…
-
Teaching Strategies for Creating Community
An article from last year from Sara Berman and Barrett Schreiner (both from USC Gould School of Law) on Teaching Strategies For Building Belonging and Creating Community in Online and In-Person Legal Education has been published in the St. Mary’s Law Journal. From the introduction: Community and belonging are interrelated yet differ in important ways;…
-
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,…
-
SSRN Has Not Jumped the Shark
SSRN, Strategic Update: Renewed Focus on Core Research Sharing Mission (Apr. 13, 2026) At SSRN, our mission is to rapidly share preprints and other early-stage research, empowering global scholars to help shape a better future. Today we are announcing an important change that reflects where we believe we can make the greatest contribution to that…
-
Salinas et al.: Law Professors Prefer AI over Peer Answers
Alejandro Salinas (Stanford), Carly Frieders, Neel Guha, Sibo Ma et al., Law Professors Prefer AI over Peer Answers (May 27, 2026):
-
Alternative Pathways Into the Legal Profession Result in Lower Bar Exam Pass Rates, Worse Career Outcomes, and Greater Risk to the Public
Adam Chilton (Dean, Chicago), Giulia G. Cusenza (Free University of Bolzano-Bozen), Lorenzo G. Luisetto (Cleveland State) & Kyle Rozema (Northwestern), Alternative Educational Pathways into the Legal Profession: Obtaining a law degree from an ABA-approved law school has long been the primary path into the American legal profession. However, some states have alternative educational pathways, including…
-
Cutler and Glaeser: How Have Universities Survived for Nearly a Millenium?
David M. Cutler (Harvard) and Edward L. Glaeser (Harvard) have a new NBER working paper, “How Have Universities Survived for Nearly a Millenium.” Here is the abstract: How have universities managed to survive and evolve over almost 1,000 years to become wildly heterogeneous, unusually fractious, multi-product, non-profit entities? Universities began as teachers’ guilds, and they…
-
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…
-
JD Degree Increases Lifetime Earnings By 41%; Amount Correlates to U.S. News Ranking of Law School
Following up on Sloan’s post yesterday: Inside Higher Ed, Graduate School Pays Off for Pharmacists, but Not Psychologists: On average, going to graduate school increases a student’s lifetime earnings by 17 percent. But that return on investment varies significantly depending on what they studied, according to new research published by the Postsecondary Education & Economics Research Center at…
-
New Data on Whether Graduate Degrees Pay Off
From 1993 to 2022, the percentage of early-career college graduates with a graduate degree grew by more than one-third (31% to 42%). During this period, law school tuition more than doubled (in constant dollars), alongside substantial increases in graduate tuition more generally. So are graduate degrees—and law degrees—still worth it? A recent NBER working paper…
-
Fordham Colloquium: The Professional Socialization of Lawyers
Fordham Law Review (vol. 94, no. 4) has a new colloquium on the ABA’s Standard 303(b)(3)—promulgated in 2022—that requires law schools to “provide substantial opportunities to students for . . . the development of a professional identity.” According to Matthew Diller’s Foreward, the colloquium’s ten essays “cover a lot of ground” but generally “suggest that…
-
The Top 100 Legal Scholars of 2025
Rob Willey (George Mason) & Melanie Knapp (George Mason), The Top 100 Legal Scholars of 2025: Traditional legal scholarship rankings rely almost exclusively on career-long publication metrics, a method that inherently favors decades-old articles and often obscures the authors producing the most impactful research today. This article presents an alternative: a ranking of the 100…
-
Journal of Legal Education Symposium at New York Law School
In case you missed it on AALS LENS: For more than 75 years, the Journal of Legal Education (JLE) has played an essential role in chronicling the development of legal education in the United States. New York Law School (NYLS) hosted a symposium on October 8, 2025, where scholars presented their views on some of…
-
Journal of Legal Education Releases Special Issue on Restorative Justice
In case you missed it on AALS LENS: The most recently released issue (73-4) of the Journal of Legal Education is based on a symposium initiated by the National Center on Restorative Justice (NCORJ) at Vermont Law and Graduate School. The issue illuminates how to include restorative justice in law school curricula and institutional offerings. This collection…
-
Sander: The Waning of Racial Preferences at American Law Schools, 2021-2025
Richard Sander (UCLA), The Waning of Racial Preferences at American Law Schools, 2021-2025: Up until now, no one has had much idea of just how, or whether, colleges, universities, and professional schools were complying with the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision prohibiting them from using racial preferences in student admissions. Using an innovative new data source,…
-
Law Students do Field Research
Indiana Univ. Professors Bill Henderson and Anjanette Raymond (Kelley School of Business and also Queen Mary University of London) offer important insights based on work they did with the Indiana Supreme Court. They asked law students and undergraduates to observe courtrooms and interview lawyers with the goal of identifying pathways to increased access to legal…