Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Legal Ed Scholarship
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The Color of Law Review
Gregory Scott Parks (Wake Forest; Google Scholar) & Etienne C. Toussaint (South Carolina; Google Scholar), The Color of Law Review, 103 B.U. L. Rev. 181 (2023): Of the approximately sixty-five Black law review Editors-in-Chief (“EICs”) throughout U.S. history, at least thirty-eight—more than half—were elected in the past ten years. What inspired the dramatic increase in…
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Protecting The Guild Or Protecting The Public? Bar Exams And The Diploma Privilege
Milan Markovic (Texas A&M; Google Scholar), Protecting the Guild or Protecting the Public? Bar Exams and the Diploma Privilege, 35 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 163 (2022): The bar examination has long loomed over legal education. Although many states formerly admitted law school graduates into legal practice via the diploma privilege, Wisconsin is the only state…
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COVID And Bar Admissions
Steven R. Smith (Cal-Western), COVID and Bar Admissions, 75 Ark. L. Rev. 527 (2022): The COVID-19 pandemic, killings of George Floyd and others, and civil unrest created dislocation, hardship, and uncertainty. For millions of people, it included deaths in family, unemployment, and serious mental and physical illness. Graduates of professional schools preparing to take licensing…
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When Old Habits Die Hard: A Comment On Sander And Steinbuch’s ‘Mismatch And Bar Passage’
Following up on Friday's post, Richard Sander (UCLA), Law-School “Mismatch” Is Worse Than We Thought: Sherod Thaxton (UCLA), When Old Habits Die Hard: A Comment on Sander and Steinbuch's “Mismatch and Bar Passage”: Mismatch theory—which posits that race-conscious admissions policies harm racial minorities by admitting students into challenging schools where they cannot succeed—has figured prominently…
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Big Law’s Immigration Advocates
Jayanth K. Krishnan (Indiana; Google Scholar), Megan Riley (Indiana) & Vitor M. Dias (Butler), Big Law’s Immigration Advocates, 2024 U. Ill. L. Rev. __ : This study examines lawyers working in the federal appellate courts who represent immigrants seeking relief from deportation. By analyzing over 23,000 appellate cases during the Trump and Obama Administrations, the…
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GPT-4 Beats 90% Of Aspiring Lawyers On The Bar Exam
Daniel Martin Katz (Chicago Kent), Michael James Bommarito (Michigan State), Shang Gao (Casetext) & Pablo Arredondo (Casetext), GPT-4 Passes the Bar Exam: In this paper, we experimentally evaluate the zero-shot performance of a preliminary version of GPT-4 against prior generations of GPT on the entire Uniform Bar Examination (UBE), including not only the multiple-choice Multistate…
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Sander: Law-School ‘Mismatch’ Is Worse Than We Thought
Richard Sander (UCLA), Law-School “Mismatch” Is Worse Than We Thought: With the Supreme Court poised to rule on affirmative-action in admissions, the time to spread the word is now. Eighteen years ago, I published an article in the Stanford Law Review which documented for the first time the enormous breadth and scale of race-based admissions…
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Weekly Legal Education Roundup
ABA Journal, Does ChatGPT Produce Fishy Briefs? ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar Council Decision, Notice of Finding Significant Noncompliance With Standard 202 (University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law) (Feb. 2023) Vikram David Amar (Dean, Illinois), Some Thoughts on the Recent Controversies Concerning Law (and Med) School Rankings:…
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An Empirical Analysis Of Clinical Legal Education At Middle Age
Robert R. Kuehn (Washington University; Google Scholar) & David A. Santacroce (Michigan), An Empirical Analysis of Clinical Legal Education at Middle Age, 70 J. Legal Educ. __ (2023): This article provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis of clinical legal education’s development and growth over the past fifty years. By analyzing dozens of surveys and reports…
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Reckoning With Structural Racism In Legal Education: Methods Toward A Pedagogy Of Antiracism
Doron Samuel-Siegel (Richmond), Reckoning with Structural Racism in Legal Education: Methods Toward a Pedagogy of Antiracism, 29 Cardozo J. Equal Rts. & Soc. Just. 1 (2022): There is an empty quality to much of what passes as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” work in legal education. Despite a robust body of scholarship on teaching law consistent…
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AALS Call For Papers: Continuing Legal Education And The Professional Education Of Lawyers
AALS, Symposium on Continuing Legal Education and the Professional Education of Lawyers: The AALS Journal of Legal Education invites abstract submissions for a symposium on “Continuing Legal Education and the Professional Education of U.S. Lawyers.” The Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law and the Pennsylvania Continuing Legal Education Board will host the in-person symposium…
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It’s Not Just Our Students: ChatGPT Is Coming For Faculty Scholarship
Chronicle of Higher Ed Op-Ed: It’s Not Just Our Students — ChatGPT Is Coming for Faculty Writing, by Ben Chrisinger (Oxford; Google Scholar): Almost immediately after OpenAI released ChatGPT in late November, people began wondering what it would mean for teaching and learning. A widely read piece in The Atlantic that provided one of the first looks at the tool’s ability…
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Imposter Syndrome & The Law School Caste System
Sara Ochs (Louisville), Imposter Syndrome & The Law School Caste System, 42 Pace L. Rev. 373 (2022): For decades, legal academia has been structured around a hierarchical caste system, with tenured and tenure-track doctrinal law professors—many of whom are men—occupying the highest caste, and professors of legal skills courses—who more often identify as women—relegated to the lower castes. The…
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Osofsky Reviews Field’s Flipping The Tax Law Classroom
Leigh Osofsky (North Carolina; Google Scholar), Flipping Classrooms in an In-Person World (JOTWELL) (reviewing Heather Field (UC-San Francisco; Google Scholar), How the Pandemic Flipped My Perspective on Flipping the Tax Law Classroom, 19 Pitt. Tax Rev. 267 (2022)): In this illuminating article, Heather Field describes her adoption of a flipped classroom model for teaching tax…
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Bilek & Merritt: ChatGPT Almost Passed The Bar, But Competent Lawyers Do Much More
Bloomberg Law Op-Ed: ChatGPT Almost Passed the Bar, But Competent Lawyers Do Much More, by Mary Lu Bilek (CUNY) & Deborah Merritt (Ohio State): ChatGPT, OpenAI’s provocative artificial intelligence program, has come close to passing the multiple-choice portion of the bar exam. The bot has also earned passing grades on law school essays that resemble…
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Law Clerk Selection And Diversity: Insights From Fifty U.S. Court Of Appeals Judges
Jeremy Fogel (Berkeley Judicial Institute), Mary Hoopes (Pepperdine) & Goodwin Liu (California Supreme Court), Law Clerk Selection and Diversity: Insights From Fifty Sitting Judges of the Federal Courts of Appeals, 137 Harv. L. Rev. ___ (2023): Judicial clerkships are key positions of responsibility and coveted opportunities for career advancement. Commentators have noted that the demographics…
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Barring Diversity? The American Bar Exam As Initiation Rite And Its Eugenics Origin
Mary Szto (Syracuse), Barring Diversity? The American Bar Exam as Initiation Rite and its Eugenics Origin, 21 Conn. Pub. Int. L.J. 38 (2022): The American bar exam is an initiation rite that bars diversity in the legal profession. According to the 2020 census, the US population is over 42% minorities. However, only 14% of the…
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Utah Symposium On Rethinking, Reimagining, And Reshaping Legal Education
Symposium, #IncludeTheirStories: Rethinking, Reimagining, and Reshaping Legal Education, 2022 Utah L. Rev. 709-890: Leslie P. Culver (Utah; Google Scholar) & Elizabeth A. Kronk Warner (Dean, Utah; Google Scholar), #IncludeTheirStories: Rethinking, Reimagining, and Reshaping Legal Education, 2022 Utah L. Rev. 709 Danielle Conway (Dean, Penn State-Dickinson), Antiracist Lawyering in Practice Begins with the Practice of Teaching and Learning…
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The Buffalo Model And ABA Standard 303(c): Bias, Cross Cultural Competency, And Antiracism
Kim Diana Connolly (SUNY-Buffalo) & Elisa Lackey (SUNY-Buffalo), The Buffalo Model: An Approach to ABA Standard 303(c)’s Exploration of Bias, Cross Cultural Competency, and Antiracism in Clinical & Experiential Law, 70 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol’y __ (2023): This essay offers initial contemplations shortly after the inception of a new opportunity for clinical and experiential…
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Oklahoma Symposium: A Life’s Work—In Memory of Professor Jonathan B. Forman
Symposium, A Life’s Work: In Memory of Professor Jonathan B. Forman, 74 Okla. L. Rev. 527-732 (2022): Katheleen Guzman (Dean, Oklahoma), Opened Doors: A Tribute to Jon Forman, 74 Okla. L. Rev. ix (2022) Leslie Book (Villanova; Google Scholar), Keith Fogg (Harvard) & Nina E. Olson (Center for Taxpayer Rights), Reducing Administrative Burdens to Protect Taxpayer Rights, 74 Okla.…
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Hofstra Hosts Symposium Today On Freedom Of Expression At American Law Schools
Hofstra hosts a symposium today on Freedom of Expression at American Law Schools (registration): Commitments to principles supporting the freedom of expression are found in statements of policy at public and private institutions of higher education throughout the United States. American law schools, either as parts of larger universities or standing alone, have embraced similar…
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Bishop Posts Two Papers On ChatGPT
Lea Bishop (Indiana-McKinney): Can ChatGPT 'Think Like a Lawyer?' A Socratic Dialogue: A witty socratic dialogue with a language-generation model, exploring the aims of legal education in the new era of machine writing. If you are a lawyer, a law student, or a law professor, you already have a good understanding of what it means…
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The Travesty Of The US News Rankings: How Legal Education Should Be Measured
Reuben Guttman (American) & Gregg Ivers (American), The Travesty of The US News Rankings: How Legal Education Should be Measured, 10 Emory Corp. Governance & Accountability Rev. __ (2023): The authors analyze the detrimental impact on legal education attributable to the chase for US News rankings and tell the story of how one law school—Howard…
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Bad Math Bar Sauce And The ABA As A Shill For The NCBE
Rory D. Bahadur (Washburn) & Kevin Ruth (PhD Mathematics, Miami), Bad Math Bar Sauce and the ABA as a Shill for the NCBE, 66 How. L.J. __ (2023): Recent scholarship purporting to employ sophisticated mathematics to decipher the pedagogies which improve institutional bar examination performance and to identify which schools over and underperform on the…
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Ryznar: Exams In The Time Of ChatGPT
Margaret Ryznar (Indiana-McKinney), Exams in the Time of ChatGPT, 80 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. Online __ (2023): This article offers various methods to administer assessments while maintaining their integrity—after asking artificial intelligence writing tool ChatGPT for its views on the matter. The sophisticated response of the chatbot, which students can use in their written…