Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Legal Education
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: (Beyond Questions and Lectures) Eleven Other Tools for the Teaching Toolbox
One facet of my efforts to promote excellent teaching and learning has been to support faculty who wish to expand their teaching techniques beyond simply asking Socratic-style questions every class. All class. Expanding one’s teaching repertoires engages students, improves learning, and, for me at least, keeps the class preparation experience challenging and stimulating. To be…
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Faculty Focus: Five Things I Wish I Knew My First Semester
Peter Szawranskyj (Faculty Focus), Five Things I Wish I Knew My First Semester (July 20, 2026). This article offers five excellent suggestions for new professors of all stripes. My first semester as a faculty member taught me something I wish I had understood on day one: most of the stress did not come from teaching…
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Starting Salaries and Law School Student Debt
From Above the Law and a recent US News article. U.S. News recently put together a ranking of the 25 schools with the highest salary-to-debt ratios in the private sector among 2024-2025 graduates. Did your law school or alma mater make the cut? Here are the Top 10. You can read more here: Staci Zaretsky,…
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Shared Responsibility for the Future of Legal Education
AALS President Danielle Conway recently gave remarks at an international conference hosted by the Association of Korean Law Schools (AKLS) and others in Seoul Korea. The remarks focused on the future of legal education, bar exam licensing, and the rule of law. When we look at the rule of law through the lens of legal…
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Gonzaga Appoints Linda Jellum as Interim Dean
From the announcement from Gonzaga Law School: Linda D. Jellum will serve as Interim Dean of Gonzaga University School of Law beginning July 20, 2026. A nationally recognized legal scholar, educator, and academic leader, Interim Dean Jellum brings more than three decades of experience in legal education, scholarship, public service, and academic administration. “As we…
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Temple Law to receive $5M gift for center to study democracy, rule of law
News from the front: Temple Law to receive $5M gift for center to study democracy, rule of lawTemple University – James E. Beasley School of Law has received a commitment of $5 million to create the Oller Center for the Rule of Law. The center will offer merit-based financial aid to incoming and returning students interested in…
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Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog — Where U.S. law professors earned their law degree (2008)
Brian Leiter really pulls together some great data. “This study is based on the educational credentials of all tenure-track and tenured law faculty as of Spring 2008. . . . This excludes adjuncts, legal writing instructors, and other ‘faculty’ who are not in tenure-stream positions. But it still covers more than 7,000 faculty at AALS-member…
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Will AI Transform Law Review Selection of Articles?
Paul Caron blogged yesterday about the coming law review shortage. With all the talk about changes brought by AI, I wonder if law reviews will begin using AI for selecting law review articles for publication. It sure would save much time. Would selection be better than the current selections?
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Law Deans By Gender
I previously posted about data (here and here) from AALS Rosenblatt’s Deans Database. There really is a treasure trove of data in the database. Below is the database’s Deans by Gender – Listed Alphabetically: Male – 120 (59.70%) Female – 81 (40.30%) Other – 0 (0.00%) An additional AI search generated this statement: “Bottom line: No confirmed nonbinary law deans…
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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;…
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Pittsburgh Tax Review Symposium: AI in Tax Practice and Law School Education
The Pittsburgh Tax Review has published Symposium, AI in Tax Practice and Law School Education, 23 Pitt, Tax Rev. 283- 353 (2026) : Sarah B. Lawsky (Illinois), Direct File as Formalization, 23 Pitt. Tax Rev. 283 (2026) (reviewed by Jeff Gordon (Vanderbilt) here): Direct File was a program created by the United States government that…
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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…
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SteuerLLM: An Open-Source AI Model for German Tax Law
An international team of researchers has released SteuerLLM, am open-source, 28-billion-parameter AI model trained on German tax law materials. In a companion article, the team reports that SteuerLLM outperforms general-purpose instruction-tuned models of comparable size and, in some tests, substantially larger systems. These results suggest that domain-specific design may matter more than parameter count for…
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Inside Higher Ed: The Risk Proposition of Law School Is Changing
Sari Kisilevsky, Inside Higher Ed, The Risk Proposition of Law School Is Changing (June 22, 2026): [Conventional] narratives miss the real story, which I’ve previously described as a cascade effect. This is the downward pressure on underrepresented students to accept weaker offers (offers charging higher tuition with less aid) to less selective law schools due to the tightening of…
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Law clinic students working to bring workplace protections to federal courts
Over the last few years, the workplace abuse by federal judges of law clerks has been in the news (and here). This law school clinic at Emory University School of Law (and here) is seeking to safeguard the workplace for law clerks. Law clerks work with “judges exercis[ing] near total control over their hours, holidays…
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UCLA Asian American Studies Center: AAPI Multimedia Textbook
The UCLA Asian American Studies Center has unveiled ‘Foundations and Futures: Asian American and Pacific Islander Multimedia Textbook’ is a helpful resource for anyone teaching Asian Americans and the Law or anyone seeking to learn more about the Asian American community. A history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, the textbook is available online and…
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More Than A Degree: A Celebration of Family in Fresno. Was it Illegal?
Commencement season is now behind us. As the celebrations have ended, it is a good time to reflect on recent commencement-related developments. Over the last two years, universities have cancelled (and here and here) “convocations that recognize Black and LGBTQ+ students, citing the Trump administration’s campaign to rein in diversity, equity and inclusion programs.” That campaign…
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Book of the Week
Great books often begin with great questions. My wonderful colleague, Libby Adler, started with this one: “How might a socialist jurisdiction “do” lgbtq legal advancement differently from a jurisdiction, such as the US, where legal advocates have relied heavily on liberal rights to achieve formal equality but have done far less to economically destratify the…
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Is the Constitution up to the Task?
Vincent Rougeau, President of the College of the Holy Cross and former dean of Boston College Law School, has penned a provocative essay in America: The Jesuit Review wondering whether our current Constitution can still serve the values set forth in its preamble in light of the current polarization in U.S. politics. It’s an importan…
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Professor Sues to Block Dean’s Appointment
This is a hard story to piece together as there is always more behind the scenes than one can read in the press. The basic facts are that Ramsi A. Woodcock, a law professor at the J. David Rosenberg College of Law at the University of Kentucky has sued the university (and its president and…
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Cult of Pedagogy: The Art of Classroom Timing
Jennifer Gonzalez (Cult of Pedagogy), The Art of Classroom Timing: 10 Ways to Fit It All In (April 27, 2026) For most of my academic life as a student, I had observed classes ending in this way: The teacher or professor said, “I see our time is up. See you next time.” Then, I had…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: Two Exciting Ideas from Professor Mary Largent Purvis
This week’s blog feature re-introduces an intermittent feature of my contributions to this blog: teaching ideas from faculty colleagues. This week, I am featuring two ideas from Associate Dean/Professor Mary Largent Purvis of Mississippi College of Law. Professor Purvis presented these ideas in a memorable and inspiring presentation at this year’s Institute for Law Teaching and Learning…
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Report Released Detailing Problems with February 2025 California Bar Exam
Last week, the legislatively mandated audit of the problems of the February 2025 California Bar Exam was released. You can find the report here. And here’s coverage from Julianne Hill at the ABA Journal: A rushed timeline, poor planning, contract failures and a host of questionable decisions—including the use of generative artificial intelligence to help…
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Proposals for AALS Annual Meeting
Proposals for programs for the AALS 2027 Annual Meeting in New York are now being accepted, and are due on August 7th. You can find more information as well as detailed submission guidelines on the AALS website. Proposals that are not organized by AALS Sections are selected by the Program Committee covering five categories: (1)…
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Getting to AI
Three major law schools have released guidance on AI use over the last few weeks: UC Berkeley, the University of Texas, and the University of Chicago. The links go to prior TaxProf Blog coverage, which links in turn to primary sources. I have brief summative comments directed to process questions and therefore aimed more at…