Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Teaching
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: Improving Your Teaching Every Time You Re-Teach a Course
Today’s teaching tidbit focuses on my favorite, easy-to-implement tool for improving my teaching of a course each time I teach it—keeping a teaching journal. After each class session I teach, I force myself to write about the class session that just ended. Calling these post-class notes to myself a “teaching journal” probably makes too much…
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Mitchell: Using Transformative Learning Theory to Teach Leadership
Jane Mitchell (Brigham Young University, J. Reuben Clark Law School), “That Class Changed My Life”: Using Transformative Learning Theory to Teach Leadership, 65 Santa Clara L. Rev. ____ (2025). Abstract Since the country’s founding, the legal profession has served as a springboard for some of society’s greatest leaders. But by and large, lawyers were not trained to…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: Speedy, Frequent, and Easily Digestible Feedback on Your Students’ Learning
Today’s post focuses on in-class tools for discovering whether your students have learned what you tried to teach them that day. These tools, collectively referred to as classroom assessment techniques or CATs, are vastly superior to our normal methods for making such assessments, such as drawing inferences from body language, assuming the speaking students represent…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: Inspiring an Unprepared Student to Prepare for Future Class Sessions
I wish to thank the AALS for inviting me to contribute to this blog and to Paul Caron for his hundreds of hours of service writing the blog all these years. As I reflected on what I might have to contribute to a blog that has delivered so much valuable content, I decided that I…
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Four Law Schools Agee To Permit Their Students To Take Courses In Each Other’s Online Programs
ABA Journal, 4 Online Law Programs Join Forces to Let Students Swap Courses: Students at four law schools [Lincoln Memorial, Southwestern, St. Mary’s, Suffolk] will be able to take high-level, specialized courses at the other three ABA-accredited schools for no cost and little paperwork hassle starting in spring 2026. [Each of these schools have] well-established…
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Sarah Lawsky’s FREE, Customizable Code And Regs Selected Sections For Any Tax Class Now Includes OBBBA
Sarah Lawsky (Illinois; Google Scholar): The make-your-own Code and Regulations website now contains the law current through July 30, 2025, and therefore is ready to generate books for this fall’s classes. Books you generate through the website will include the changes implemented by Public Law 119-21, enacted on July 4, 2025, including amending and renumbering previously existing…
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Tax Prof Alex Zhang Receives Emory Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award For Excellence
Alex Zhang receives Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Education from Emory: Assistant Professor of Law Alex Zhang was honored with the Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Education. Nominations praised Zhang's engaging teaching methods, diverse instructional approaches, and his remarkable ability to demystify complex legal concepts.…
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Tax Prof Stephanie McMahon Receives 2025 Cincinnati Teaching Award
Stephanie Hunter McMahon, who is leaving Cincinnati to join the faculty at Indiana-Bloomington, received Cincinnati's Goldman Prize for Excellence in Teaching: “I never thought I would have understood, let alone enjoy, a tax class. Professor McMahon expertly breaks down complicated tax concepts and muddy statutory codes in a way that makes students fully understand what…
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Tax Profs Brant Hellwig And Daniel Hemel Receive 2025 NYU Teaching Awards
NYU Law Announces 2025 Teaching Award Recipients: Richard Brooks, Brant Hellwig LLM ’00, and Daniel Hemel have been named this year’s recipients of the NYU Law Teaching Award, which recognizes faculty members who have made outstanding contributions to student learning and engagement. Each year, NYU Law solicits nominations from students and faculty for the award based on criteria that…
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Creative Tax Writing At Iowa
Diane Lourdes Dick (Iowa), Creative Tax Writing At Iowa: This year, I invited students in both of my Spring 2025 tax courses at the University of Iowa College of Law to participate in a new (and entirely optional!) creative writing competition. The prompt was simple—but strange: Imagine a world where cash no longer necessarily has…
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2025 Tannenwald Tax Writing Competition
The Theodore Tannenwald, Jr. Foundation for Excellence in Tax Scholarship and American College of Tax Counsel are sponsoring the 2025 Tannenwald Writing Competition. Named for the late Tax Court Judge Theodore Tannenwald, Jr., and designed to perpetuate his dedication to high-quality legal scholarship, the Tannenwald Writing Competition is open to all full- or part-time law school students in J.D., LL.M.,…
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Winners Of The 2025 National Tax Moot Court Competition
Florida Bar, Stetson Captures Tax Section’s 2025 National Tax Moot Court Crown: After three days of competition featuring teams from law schools across the nation, Stetson University College of Law emerged as the overall champion in the Tax Section’s 2025 National Tax Moot Court Competition, sweeping the event with top honors in Best Oral Argument,…
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2024 IFA International Tax Student Writing Award; Call For Entrants In 2025 Competition
The winners of the International Fiscal Association's 2024 International Tax Student Writing Competition are: Emily Lawson (Temple), EITC For ITIN-Holders: Bilateral International Tax Treaty Nondiscrimination Articles To The Rescue Faculty Sponsor: Alice Abreu The field of international tax stands as one of the most complicated and intricate parts of the tax law, and the study of the…
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Tax Executives Institute Student Case Competition
The deadline to apply for the TEI – International Tax Case Competition is April 30, 2025 (register): TEI supports students in developing a passion for taxation with our International Tax Student Case Competition. With a prize of CAD$2,000 provided by IFA Canada, the competition brings together students, mentors, practitioners, and judges from around the world for…
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CALI Seeks New Authors To Take Over And Update Three Tax Casebooks
The Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) is looking for new authors to take over and update the three tax casebooks in its eLangdell Bookstore. The books are free to download and use by anyone under a Creative Commons License. (Printed versions are available at cost.) Although the books are free, CALI negotiates a…
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2024 Tannenwald Tax Writing Competition Winners
The Theodore Tannenwald, Jr. Foundation for Excellence in Tax Scholarship has announced the winners of the 2024 tax writing competition: First Prize ($5,000): Skyler Dykes (Washington University), Taxing Cultural EndowmentsFaculty Sponsor: Conor Clarke Second Prize ($2,500):
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AALS Tax Section Program Today: Teaching Tax — Textbooks, Tools, And Techniques
Section on Taxation, Teaching Tax: Textbooks, Tools, and Techniques 2:40 – 5:10 pm Moscone Center, Level Two South (Room 205) This panel, designed for new law teachers as well as more experienced teachers, will explore the opportunities and challenges of selecting and developing course materials in tax courses. How do you choose the right textbook for…
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Sarah Lawsky Provides FREE, Customizable Code And Regs Selected Sections For Any Tax Class
Sarah Lawsky (Northwestern; Google Scholar): As the spring term and new year are approaching, I wanted to let you know that the make-your-own Code and regulations website now contains the law current through December 5, 2024, and therefore should be ready for books for this spring's classes. The inflation adjustment revenue procedure for 2025 is also now…
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Tax Class By Prof. Ben Leff
Ben Leff (American), Tax Class: Tax law is not just about numbers! It is the system that weaves our economic lives and our social policies together to make a just (or unjust) society. The federal income tax class is the introductory class to the world of taxation at most U.S. law schools. It introduces students…
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Speck: Zoom As An In-Person Learning Platform
Sloan Speck (Colorado; Google Scholar), Zoom as an In-Person Learning Platform, 99 N.D. L. Rev. 627 (2024): During the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented shift to remote learning spurred many legal educators to reassess their pedagogical norms and practices. These reassessments were enabled, in part, by the widespread adoption and acceptance of videoconferencing software, most notably Zoom,…
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Why Professors Can’t Teach
Jonathan Zimmerman (Penn), Why Professors Can’t Teach, Washington Monthly, Sept./Oct. 2024: In 1949, the graduate dean at the University of Minnesota imagined that he had fallen asleep and woken up in 1984. The first thing he saw was a newspaper. It mentioned none of the “Orwellian horrors” that George Orwell had predicted in his novel.…
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ABA Tax Section Releases 24th Annual Law Student Tax Challenge Problem
The ABA Tax Section has released the J.D. Problem (rules) and LL.M. Problem (rules) for the 24th Annual Law Student Tax Challenge: An alternative to traditional moot court competitions, the Law Student Tax Challenge (LSTC) is organized by the Section’s Young Lawyers Forum. The LSTC asks two-person teams of students to solve a complex business problem that might arise in everyday tax…
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University Of North Carolina Tax Profs Receive Awards For Teaching And Scholarship
Kathleen Thomas and Leigh Osofsky received awards for excellence in teaching and scholarship from the University of North Carolina School of Law:
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Jeff Kwall Named Professor Of The Year At Loyola-Chicago Law School
From Tax Prof Jeffrey Kwall, Kathleen and Bernard Beazley Research Professor of Law at Loyola-Chicago: I am happy to report that, for the 3rd time in the past 9 years, I was elected Professor of the Year by the graduating class at Loyola Law School. I am so fortunate to be in a position to…
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The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students Isn’t On The Syllabus: Humility
Following up on my previous posts (link below): New York Times Op-Ed: The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students Isn’t on the Syllabus, by Frank Bruni: I warn my students. At the start of every semester, on the first day of every course, I confess to certain passions and quirks and tell them to…