Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Chris Cioffi (Bloomberg Law): Musk Would Avoid $2 Billion Tax Bill With Trump Account Donation
(more…)Elon Musk’s enormous promise to give a SpaceX share to every child in America could vaporize around $2.6 billion in taxes for Musk….And though receiving stocks in Trump Accounts could be a good deal for holders of the tax-privileged accounts, there are numerous logistical hurdles to clear before cashing in, tax experts say.
Ariel Jurow Kleiman (USC, SSRN), presents at San Diego today as part of its Tax Law Speaker Series.
Monday, Nov. 2, 2026 | noon – 1:00 p.m. PST
Warren Hall 2A, University of San Diego
students welcome / lunch provided / registration not required
Orly Mazur (SMU) presents Modernizing the IRS in the Age of AI, 45 Va. Tax Rev. 182 (2026), at Pepperdine today as part of its Fall 2026 Pepperdine Tax Policy Workshop Series, hosted by Deanna Newton. If you would like to attend any of the workshops (and join the post-workshop lunch), please contact Deanna Newton.
Update: Post-workshop lunch:
New York Times Op-Ed: ‘I Shall Be Very Surprised if There Isn’t a Next Chapter’: A Q&A With Sarah Coakley, by Peter Wehner (Trinity Forum):
Read moreThe Rev. Dr. Sarah Coakley is one of the most original and consequential theologians in the world. An Anglican priest and philosopher of religion, she was the first woman elected the Norris-Hulse professor of divinity at Cambridge, a chair she held until 2018, and before that she was the Mallinckrodt professor of divinity at Harvard. She is the author of eight books, including “God, Sexuality and the Self,” the first volume of her projected four-part systematic theology.
I spoke to Dr. Coakley about why she decided, at a young age, that she wanted to be a theologian; the times she has wanted to disbelieve in God but never quite could; and her attempt to reunite academic theology with the life of the church and the practice of prayer. Contemplative prayer, Dr. Coakley said, is a “crucible of purification.” …
1. Origins. Sarah Coakley: From very earliest childhood, in a way that I can’t even now explain, God seemed to me to be an obvious and holy reality. And I’m therefore very much a once-born, as William James put it. I’ve never had a conversion experience. There have been times when I’ve wanted not to believe in God. There are lots of good reasons for not believing in God, and sometimes those reasons have seemed overwhelming. But I have great difficulty in not believing in God.
Peter Wehner: You told Robert Lawrence Kuhn in an interview that you’ve often wanted not to believe in God for a lot of rational reasons, but you found it very difficult. Could you elaborate on that? Is the reason you find yourself wanting to disbelieve in God intellectual? And why did you find yourself coming back to God?
Coakley: The times when I’ve wanted to give it all up had to do partly with frustration with the institution of the church. They’re often very bad institutions, frankly. But the more important theological existential side has been an overwhelming sensibility about the way that God either abandons or oppresses us at times. And it’s that very bizarre combination of oppressive presence but at the same time abandonment. It is described probably more profoundly than anywhere else in Christian tradition in John of the Cross’s second dark night, the night of spirit, but also in Martin Luther’s Deus absconditus, the “hidden God.”
Christianity Today: What a Painfully Weird Movie Can Show Us About Lying and Liars, by Russell Moore:
Read moreNathan Fielder is not for everyone.
The kind of person who can’t watch the “Scott’s Tots” episode of The Office because of the cringe factor would never make it through Fielder’s characteristic awkwardness. This time it was on display in his new film, You Can See Everything, in which Fielder spends time with even-more-awkward Elizabeth Holmes—convicted of defrauding stockholders with her Theranos blood-testing device—and her cartoonishly narcissistic romantic partner during the last weeks before Holmes’s incarceration. The primary frustration for moviegoers so far, though, is not the weirdness of it all, but the fact that the film does not live up to its title.
In one sense, you can see everything in this movie—so much so that you wonder why these people ever agreed to let these cameras into their home. You can see Holmes’s manipulation, the boyfriend’s sociopathy, and Fielder’s ethical shadiness and emotional complicity playing out on the screen. You can see Holmes’s parents trying to maintain stability while expressing anguish and perhaps even repressed shame on their faces. What audiences say they can’t see, though, is the answer to the question they want to know: Is this convicted fraudster a serial liar or a dupe who’s deluded?
Christianity Today, What the Bible’s Most Political Book Can Teach Us, by Michael J. Rhodes (Author, Reimagining Biblical Politics (2026):
Read moreEsther asks tough questions, offers no easy answers, and remains more vital than ever as Americans go to the polls.
Faced with a toxic, increasingly partisan political moment, some Christians opt for an all-or-nothing political certainty that paints every political issue in black and white. At its worst, such certainty can lead Christians to confidently identify their political opponents as the enemies of God and to claim to know exactly how God is at work on the political scene.
Others, though, are overwhelmed by ongoing uncertainty. Even after we cast our votes in the upcoming midterms, we’ll be confronted with a seemingly endless stream of political questions. Should we join this protest? How about that march? Should we call our representatives or publicly support a specific policy? Should we donate to a political campaign, post about a political issue on social media, or bring that awkward political conversation up with our extended family and friends?
If overconfidence can lead us in dark, demonizing directions, uncertainty can leave us with a crippling paralysis. What’s an aspiring political disciple to do?
Enter the Book of Esther.
Biblical scholars—including me, in my book Reimagining Biblical Politics—have argued Esther might be the most political book in the Bible. …
Esther’s political career begins when she makes the best of an awful situation, hiding her ethnicity and winning favor on the way to becoming queen. She acts subversively to ensure Haman gets what’s coming to him. By the end, Esther and Mordecai effectively hold public office, writing law from within the empire itself (8:1–2; 7–8).
If Esther is arguably the Bible’s most political book, it’s also the most ambiguous. It’s not just that God goes unmentioned; it’s as if the narrator has systematically erased every possible reference to Israel’s faith. There is no mention of temple, Torah, or even prayer.
Readers have been arguing about how to interpret this ambiguity for millennia. Is God’s absence the narrator’s clever way of winking at divine providence at work behind the scenes? Or does God’s absence from the story serve to highlight what the human characters do? Does the story even suggest God has withdrawn from active involvement with his people? …
Bloomberg, Tax-the-Rich Masterminds Bet Their Moment Has Finally Arrived:
Read moreWhen Senator Elizabeth Warren ran for president in 2020, she suggested making America’s richest households pay a tax on their wealth. David Gamage was one of the people called in to work on it.
Gamage, a University of Missouri tax law professor who worked in the Treasury Department under President Barack Obama, was asked to help tailor a proposal and then a bill that could survive legal challenges. But Warren’s White House bid fell short, and her tax idea didn’t make it out of committee even though Democrats controlled Congress at the time (she has since reintroduced the legislation).
In spite of that, the unassuming Gamage became something of a guru. After Warren’s effort failed, he started hearing from politicians and activists across the US who wanted to tax wealth. Most of the queries he put aside. But at the urging of fellow law professor Darien Shanske, Gamage reconsidered a pitch from SEIU-UHW, a labor union looking for a way to tax California’s billionaires.
New York Times Sound Off: A Double Standard for ‘Conservative’ and ‘Liberal’ Labels?, by Patrick Healy:
Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, reached out after he was described as “conservative” in two Times articles within 24 hours. He said the label was accurate, but argued that The Times applied such labels inconsistently to academics and analysts — using “conservative” far more. He did his own digging into our usage; so did we, and he had a good point. I asked him to talk it through.
Following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. …
JOSH: … I went through the Westlaw archives and just sort of searched for “liberal” law professors and “conservative” law professors in the New York Times database, and it was far more likely that you’re identifying a conservative than a liberal. And those numbers are stacked because liberals are quoted even more often. So the numbers even have a greater disparity.
And this sort of reinforces, I think, a perception that both the academy and frankly the media views a liberal position as a neutral position. And the conservative position is the other, the outlier. And that’s why you have to have this sort of nomenclature, this sort of adjective to describe it. …
PATRICK: Yeah. Josh, I think there’s real truth to your critique and it’s something we need to do a better job on. … I do really think you’re right. It can come off like The Times treats liberals as normal and conservatives as unique and worthy of labeling. In the legal academy, there are a lot of liberals, but that doesn’t justify it. I think we need to be more discerning about it.
Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: Kudos to the New York Times: The Newspaper Acknowledges a Source’s Criticism, by James Freeman:
Read moreFollowing up on my previous post, Justice Department Sides With Churches In Political Speech/Tax-Exempt Status Case: Bloomberg Law, Religious Groups Press for Full Revival of Political Speech Suit:
Read moreReligious groups are urging a federal appeals court to fully reverse a lower court’s dismissal of their challenge to a ban on churches engaging in political activity, rather than issuing a narrow ruling as the Trump administration requested.
The Justice Department last month asked the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to narrowly rule that the Anti-Injunction Act doesn’t apply to a proposed settlement between the government and the religious groups. But the religious groups say the court should find that the Anti-Injunction Act doesn’t apply to any aspect of their case.
“A partial affirmance would freeze a jurisdictional dismissal of the very claims the consent judgment resolves on its own terms,” National Religious Broadcasters and others said in an Oct. 27 brief. “Therefore, this Court should reverse the judgment in its entirety.” …
Adam Feldman (President, EmpiriLaw), How National Are America’s Law Schools?:
How far can a law school’s professional network take its graduates? Geographic placement would seem one way to find out. A school whose graduates work across many states might appear to have greater reach than one whose graduates overwhelmingly remain in the same state. But the most substantial legal employment markets are not distributed evenly across the country, and schools can connect graduates to nationally prominent employers without sending them far from campus.
Consider Columbia and Duke. According to the ABA’s Class of 2025 disclosures, 71.8% of Columbia’s employed graduates and 71.2% of Duke’s entered firms with more than 500 lawyers. Yet 74.3% of Columbia’s employed graduates worked in New York, compared with only 34.9% of Duke’s, even though New York was also Duke’s leading destination. Columbia’s three largest destination states accounted for 88.6% of its employed graduates; Duke’s accounted for 57.2%.
The disparity is not unique. NYU placed 62.6% of employed graduates in the largest firms and 74.2% in New York. Virginia’s large-firm share was a comparable 64.8%, but its leading destination, Washington, D.C., accounted for only 28.6%. USC and Michigan likewise had relatively similar large-firm shares—60.2% and 55.7%—while 81.9% of USC graduates worked in California, compared with 33.3% of Michigan graduates in New York. Fordham’s 86.0% New York concentration contrasts with Vanderbilt’s 19.9% in Tennessee, despite large-firm placement rates of 48.8% and 47.0%. …
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