Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Scholarship
-
New Evidence on the Elasticity of Taxable Income
Xavier Dufour, Pierre-Carl Michaud, and Michael G. Smart, “Salience and the Elasticity of Taxable Income: Evidence from Top-bracket Tax Reforms” (NBER January 2026): We estimate heterogeneous responses to top-bracket tax reforms using a triple-difference design that exploits variation in tax rate changes and the thresholds at which they apply. This strategy identifies behavioral responses even…
-
Critiquing AI-Generated Legal Scholarship
My posts on law professors’ using Generative AI to compose law review articles (first one here, second one here) continue to generate interesting responses. Which, of course, is part of my goal: I blog to learn. Today’s addition: Michael L. Smith (Oklahoma Law), “Generative AI and the Purpose of Legal Scholarship” (forthcoming, U. Mass. L.…
-
Viswanathan Presents “Earmarked Taxes and Redistribution” Today at San Diego
Manoj Viswanathan (UC Law SF) presents Earmarked Taxes and Redistribution at San Diego today as part of its Tax Law Speaker Series.
-
ChatGPT Generates a Novel Tax Strategy
Artificial intelligence can now generate tax minimization strategies when fed only the text of tax authorities — without any internal IRS data and without any laborious hand coding of tax code sections.
-
The SSRN Top Five New Tax Papers Ranking Is Broken
The SSRN tax download rankings are broken and may never return
-
Book of the Week
University of San Diego Law Professor Lisa Ramsey is just out with Trademarks and Free Speech from Cambridge University Press. Her case is that current trademark law is insufficiently sensitive to First Amendment concerns, and she argues passionately for reform. You can sign up to hear her discuss the book virtually on Feb. 3 at…
-
AI-Generated Legal Scholarship
I ask, and sometimes I receive. In a recent post, I wondered aloud: Could ChatGPT or any of its rivals (in any of their variations, write a publishable work of legal scholarship? What further questions would the answer (yes? no?) raise? Perhaps that’s been done? The asking? The writing? The submitting? The publishing? I now…
-
2025 IFA International Tax Student Writing Award; Call For Entrants In 2026 Competition
The winner of the International Fiscal Association’s 2025 International Tax Student Writing Competition is: Jacob Cohen (UVA / Skadden): Crystals and Mud in International Taxation: Why the Principal Purpose Test’s Impact Will Not Meet Expectations. Faculty Sponsor: Ruth Mason
-
-
Using ChatGPT to Write Whole Law Review Articles?
Joshua Gans, an economist at the University of Toronto, published a recent Substack essay that might give pause to researchers and scholars in all fields: “Reflections on Vibe Researching: My year-long experiment in AI first research.” His opening: “Write me a paper that will get published in Econometrica.” I tried that prompt (and nothing more…
-
Zhang: Racial Integration and Tax Exemption
Alex Zhang (Emory) argues that the government has used tax exemptions to exacerbate racial equality
-
-
SSRN Author Rankings
Year end results for total 2025 downloads are here. Sort of our version of the NYTimes bestseller list. Those who appear are proud and excited. Those who do not point out that quantity and quality don’t always mesh. In any event, two scholars, Daniel Solove and Cass Sunstein clearly stand at the top of the…
-
Darrow-Kleinhaus: Cautionary Notes on the NextGen Bar Exam
Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus, Touro, “Even If You’ve Adopted the Next Gen UBE, Your Work Isn’t Done Yet,” 40 Touro L. Rev. 889 (2025). Abstract The National Conference of Bar Examiners (“NCBE”) is set to administer the NextGen Uniform Bar Examination’s (“UBE”) first release in July 2026. The exam questions are well-structured, well written, and require examinees…
-
Appleby Presents “Constitutional Commandeering” Today at AALS
Andrew Appleby (Tennessee) presents Constitutional Commandeering during the Section on State and Local Government Law’s main session, Crisis and Capacity: State and Local Government Law in a Time of Constraint, today at AALS: This Article traces the evolution of the anti-commandeering doctrine and its increasing relevance to federal limitations on state taxation, before exploring the role of…
-
-
-
Book of the Week
Following up on her widely-acclaimed monograph, The Code of Capital, Katharina Pistor, the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School offers us this fall, The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It. In an admirably concise effort, she tackles topics made central by the legal realists involving the role of…
-
-
-
Book of the Week
My Northeastern colleague, Professor of Law and Biology Jonathan Kahn has penned a fascinating exploration of how the concept of diversity (often racial diversity) has unwittingly contributed to the perpetuation of biological conceptions of race in a variety of settings: The Uses of Diversity (Columbia Univ. Press. 2025) His analysis is far more penetrating, but…
-
Legal History Awards
University of Miami Professor of Law and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar, Kunal M. Parker has been awarded the John Phillip Reed Book Award by the American Society for Legal History, for his monograph The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2024). The full list of this year’s awards is here: https://aslh.net/aslh-book-prize-winners-2025/
-
Cope et. al: Can AI Exam-Grading Replace Law Professors?
Kevin L. Cope (Virginia), Jes Frankenreiter (Washington University in St. Louis), Scott Hirst (Boston University), Eric A. Posner (Chicago), Daniel Schwarcz (Minnesota), Dane Thorley (BYU), Grading Machines: Can AI Exam-Grading Replace Law Professors? Abstract In the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant technical advances, such that legal-advocacy organizations are increasingly adopting…
-
The Top Five New Tax Papers
There is quite a bit of movement in this week’s list of new tax paper downloads on SSRN, with new papers debuting on the list at #4 and #5: Editor’s Note: If you would like to receive a daily email with links to tax posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.
-
NIL Era Brings Threat of Tax Exemption Abuses
Bloomberg (Andrew Leahey): “A recent FOIAball investigation into UCLA’s football program offers more than a peek at college sports fundraising in the era of name, image, and likeness compensation—it may expose a test case in tax enforcement. Public records suggest that donors were routed through a 501(c)(3) charity to support NIL deals while claiming tax deductions.”