TaxProf Blog has been a labor of love these past 21 years. I have been puzzling over when would be the right time to stop. Typepad, the platform on which TaxProf Blog is hosted, made the decision for me when it announced on August 27th that it will discontinue all blogs effective September 30th. At this stage in my life, I am not interested in starting anew on a different platform. I hope to find another home for the massive content of my 55,780 TaxProf Blog posts. If I do, I will post the link on this post before September 30th and notify the subscribers to my tax and legal education email lists.

I am proud of the role TaxProf Blog has played in the tax and legal education communities over the past 21 years. My boyhood dream was to be a sports reporter covering the Boston Red Sox on a daily basis for The Boston Globe (after it became obvious even to me that my dream of playing first base for the Red Sox would not pan out). My wife Courtney early on said the blog scratched that itch for me in academics rather than sports.

Before TaxProf Blog sunsets on September 30th, I would greatly appreciate it if readers who have enjoyed my tax, legal education, and/or faith coverage through the years would drop a short note in the comment section at the bottom of this post. When I eventually retire, I will cherish the memories of the time I spent writing this blog for over two decades in the hope that it enriched your lives just a little bit.

Paul

Update:

Brian Leiter (Chicago; Leiter Law School Reports), The Times They Are A Changin'...:

... and not just because democracy and the rule of law are ending in America!  TaxProf Blog is shutting down. ... Paul Caron's blog was the only other law blog I read regularly (I occasionally look at Prawfs as well, but not as regularly).  It's a shame he's retiring, but I understand his reasons!  You can leave notes of appreciation on the Blog Emperor's final post.

Glenn Reynolds (Tennessee; Instapundit), HE’LL BE MISSED: Paul Caron: My Last TaxProf Blog Post.:

[T]hanks, Paul, for the great contribution you’ve made for all these years. You’ve done a lot for a lot of people, and not just in the tax world.

 Jack Bogdanski (Lewis & Clark), Last Call:

It's a dark day in the once-bright blogosphere. One of the grand-daddies of all blogs, TaxProf Blog, is disappearing, effective today. By the time you read this, it may already be gone.

The guy behind the blog, a tax law professor named Paul Caron, has pulled the plug on his pet project after 21 years of tireless daily coverage of tax law, legal education, higher education, and several other topics dear to his heart. He's put up more than 55,000 posts. That's something like seven or eight posts a day. Every. Single. Day. ...

He started TaxProf Blog shortly after I launched my original effort, but while I have taken several extended breaks from the blogging grind just to regain my sanity, Caron has never stopped. And in the meantime, get this, he moved from his first law professorship at the University of Cincinnati to a tenured slot on the Pepperdine University law faculty, and then they made him Pepperdine dean! He's been the dean there for eight years and change, all the while keeping up one of the most ambitious websites there ever was or ever will be. It's the stuff of legend. ...

Given his remarkable energy and tenacity, why give up blogging now? Well, for one thing, Caron's at retirement age. But what forced his hand was that TaxProf Blog is on the Typepad blogging platform, and that platform is going dark, for all of its writers, any minute now. Yes, he could re-restablish TaxProf Blog on another system, like Google's Blogger (which is where this blog resides), but I can tell you from experience, the hassle of the transition would be enormous, and he knows it.

Caron has always been gracious to me, charitable in reviewing my professional work, and offering nothing but nice things to say about my hobby, currently on your screen. Although I've met him in person only once or twice, and we're different in a lot of ways—for example, no one has ever mistaken me for dean material—I feel a kinship with the guy. And so, like so many of his readers, I'm sad to see his blog shut down.

To say that his Herculean efforts will be missed is beyond an understatement. If there's ever a Hall of Fame for bloggers, Caron will not be in it. No, his name will be over the front door and there'll be a statute of the guy outside.

Josh Blackburn (South Texas), Farewell to the TaxProfBlog:

Blogging can be a thankless and burdensome task. We should all be grateful for Dean Paul Caron's many years of service.

In 2011, while clerking on the Sixth Circuit, I entered the academic job market. At the time, I checked Paul Caron's TaxProfBlog regularly. Paul compiled information about VAPs, fellowships, and other aspects of academia. I reached out to Paul, and asked if he would meet. He graciously agreed!

I'll never forget the meeting. We caught up at a Starbucks near the campus of the University of Cincinnati. Who walks in, but the former mayor of Cincy: Jerry Springer. Yes, that Jerry Springer. Paul offered some invaluable advice about the academic market and how to approach the meat market. And Jerry offered some useful advice of how to handle conflicts at faculty meetings. (Okay, I made up the last point, but it would be hilarious to see Jerry manage a hiring meeting.)

Since then, I have been fortunate to keep Paul in my circle of contacts. I still read his blog daily, and often will email him about certain items he may wish to cover. Paul's output is staggering. He has published more than 55,000 posts, on top of his full-time job as a Dean! Paul also answers emails at all hours of the day, a remarkable feat. He doesn't miss a thing.

Alas, all good things come to an end. In 2023, I offered a requiem for SCOTUSBlog, which seemed destined to drift away, though thanks to a bizarre turn of events, it is not being bolstered by The Dispatch. But now, a pillar of the legal blogosphere will draw to a close. TypePad, the once-popular blogging software, is shutting down at the end of September. Paul has announced that he is shutting down TaxProfBlog. I will preserve his final post since the current page will soon vanish. ...

Blogging can be a thankless and burdensome task. We don't earn any actual income for doing it, and receive countless attacks from people who may never write any publicly. Indeed, social media for better or worse, has supplanted much of what made the legal blogosphere so important. I started blogging in the Fall of 2009, and still enjoy the process. But I do not write nearly as much as I used to, and I see diminishing returns.

We should all be grateful for Dean Paul Caron's many year or service. No one will replace him.

Steven Chung (Tax Attorney, Los Angeles), Goodbye To A Blogging Pioneer: Reflecting On The TaxProf Blog’s Legacy In A Changing Internet Era And Its Influence On One Tax Attorney:

Although many blogs [have] appeared on the net, most lasted only a short time before the number of posts faded and bloggers eventually shut them down or abandoned them. Only a few achieved consistent notability. One of them was the TaxProf blog, which Paul Caron — the current dean of Pepperdine Caruso School of Law — ran. While the blog catered to the tax and law school community, it stood out for its consistent release of relevant news alongside the occasional personal or religious post. If news appeared on the TaxProf Blog, it deserved a read.

On Monday, Caron announced that after 21 years and 55,780 posts, he would end the blog. He made the decision after learning that the platform hosting his blog would discontinue all blogs on September 30.

I think I first came across the TaxProf blog when I was a tax LLM student at Chapman School of Law. I was visiting the late Michael Lang during his office hours and I happened to notice the blog on his computer monitor. From that moment, I visited the TaxProf blog regularly. ...

I will miss the TaxProf Blog not just for the influence it had on me, but also because it represents one of a dying breed of blogs created as a “labor of love,” as Caron puts it. Blogs have given way to social media. Bloggers have morphed into influencers who care more about pleasing monetization algorithms, boosting view counts, or gaining followers. And commentators write in ways designed to troll or provoke reactions, rather than to make people think.

I am hopeful that algorithms of the future will put an end to clout chasing and reward those who provide useful information like the TaxProf Blog did for 21 years.

Law.com, Eulogy to a Blog: Paul Caron Ends TaxProf Blog:

On Monday morning, Paul Caron, creator of TaxProf blog, uploaded post number 55,782—his last one after posting daily for over 21 years. ...

Paul Caron has been what I call an anchor-person dean,” Danielle M. Conway, dean and Donald J. Farage Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law, told Law.com. “He has always been available to other deans, and the blog post is the embodiment of that availability.” He does the research and curation to provide information to people who are in decision-making positions, Conway said, but he also teaches everyone about what is happening in legal education, pulling from public documents that he summarizes in a transparent way. ...

Caron made the tough decision to end his blogging legacy that has brought him fame—sans fortune—verifiable by having received over 200 million page views over the past two decades.

It’s one of the few “email blasts” William Brewbaker III, dean and professor of law at the University of Alabama School of Law, said he has allowed in his inbox, adding, “I’m not aware of anything else quite like it.” He referred to Caron’s blog as “a ‘one-stop shop’ for news and commentary about things law professors and deans need to keep up with.... Paul’s own voice is also evident in the blog—the tax professor, the person of faith, the advocate for his beloved Pepperdine Law School,” Brewbaker added.

Michael Graetz, Justus S. Hotchkiss Professor Emeritus of Law and Professorial Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, told Law.com that he was "surprised—and impressed—"that Caron was able to continue it for so long given the responsibilities he had taken on as dean of Pepperdine. ... Paul’s blog has been a great service to tax professors, filled with useful information that otherwise would have been missed,” Graetz said. “He provided an extraordinary service for many years—one not easily replaced.”

“This is truly the end of an era,” Ruth Mason, Edwin S. Cohen Distinguished Professor of Law and Taxation at the University of Virginia School of Law, told Law.com. “For at least two decades, Paul Caron’s blog has been the source for news about tax legal academia.” “I will miss the blog, and I’m grateful to Paul for providing this service to the tax community,” she added.

“Paul is really an extraordinary guy in every aspect—as a dean, professor and scholar, which he has brought to the blog as a communicator of knowledge and information and insight across academia and even into practice,” Robert Ahdieh, dean and Anthony G. Buzbee Endowed Dean’s Chair at Texas A&M University School of Law, told Law.com, who also referred to Caron as “self-effacing, gracious and modest.” ...

“Paul Caron’s blog has been invaluable in legal education,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, told Law.com. “At a time when everything seems increasingly partisan, his blog was a neutral source of essential information for legal educators,” adding that he realized it was a “huge amount of work for him, but it was tremendously beneficial to all of us who learned by reading it.” ...

Caron said that he has always done most of the blog work on weekends, so “I would often tell my wife and children that I couldn't do something because I needed to ‘feed the beast,'" but "now that the beast is no more, I am looking forward to traveling more with my wife, including visiting our now adult children in Madison and Palo Alto.”

Reuters, Groundbreaking Law Blog Calls It Quits After 21 Years:

The 21-year-old TaxProf Blog founder and Pepperdine Law Dean Paul Caron announced on his soon-to-be defunct blog. ...

TaxProf Blog was an influential early entrant in the constellation of law professor blogs that flourished in the mid-2000s through the 2010s, before social media sites such as Twitter (now X) chipped away at their dominance. But TaxProf Blog remained relevant as others faded, serving as a digital water cooler for all of U.S. legal education.

In addition to posts on tax law [and legal education] ...  Caron threw in a smattering of posts on religion. “It is a big loss for us,” Boston University law dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig wrote in one of dozens of comments on Caron's farewell post. “To us in the legal academy, your blog was like day-to-day reporting of the sport of legal education.” ...

ABA Journal, Blogging Law Professors Consider Their Options After Web Host Shutdown; At Least One Is Calling It Quits:

The end-of-the-month shutdown of web hosting platform Typepad has blogging law professors scrambling to find a replacement or considering whether to shut down.

At least one legal educator has already made the decision to retire from blogging. He is Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law dean Paul Caron, co-founder of the Law Professor Blogs Network, which is closing with Typepad’s demise. ...

Caron informed members of the Law Professors Blog Network about the shutdown this week. He offered a tech support engineer to help transitioning to LexBlog, which has offered to host the law blogs.

“It has been an honor to serve as your ‘Blog Emperor’ through this remarkable chapter in self-publishing, the evolution of the internet, and legal education in America,” Caron wrote in his notice to members. “Thanks for your partnership all these years.”

• Legal Insurrection, Paul Caron is Shutting Down the TaxProf Blog
• National Jurist, TaxProf Blog Signs Off, Paul Caron Bids Farewell After 21 Years
• Vox PPLI, A Lighthouse at Midnight Goes Dark; A Sad Farewell to TaxLaw Blog.

TaxProf Blog has been a labor of love these past 21 years. I have been puzzling over when would be the right time to stop. Typepad, the platform on which TaxProf Blog is hosted, made the decision for me when it announced on August 27th that it will discontinue all blogs effective September 30th. At this stage in my life, I am not interested in starting anew on a different platform. I hope to find another home for the massive content of my 55,780 TaxProf Blog posts. If I do, I will post the link on this post before September 30th and notify the subscribers to my tax and legal education email lists.

I am proud of the role TaxProf Blog has played in the tax and legal education communities over the past 21 years. My boyhood dream was to be a sports reporter covering the Boston Red Sox on a daily basis for The Boston Globe (after it became obvious even to me that my dream of playing first base for the Red Sox would not pan out). My wife Courtney early on said the blog scratched that itch for me in academics rather than sports.

Before TaxProf Blog sunsets on September 30th, I would greatly appreciate it if readers who have enjoyed my tax, legal education, and/or faith coverage through the years would drop a short note in the comment section at the bottom of this post. When I eventually retire, I will cherish the memories of the time I spent writing this blog for over two decades in the hope that it enriched your lives just a little bit.

Paul

Update:

Brian Leiter (Chicago; Leiter Law School Reports), The Times They Are A Changin'...:

... and not just because democracy and the rule of law are ending in America!  TaxProf Blog is shutting down. ... Paul Caron's blog was the only other law blog I read regularly (I occasionally look at Prawfs as well, but not as regularly).  It's a shame he's retiring, but I understand his reasons!  You can leave notes of appreciation on the Blog Emperor's final post.

Glenn Reynolds (Tennessee; Instapundit), HE’LL BE MISSED: Paul Caron: My Last TaxProf Blog Post.:

[T]hanks, Paul, for the great contribution you’ve made for all these years. You’ve done a lot for a lot of people, and not just in the tax world.

Josh Blackburn (South Texas), Farewell to the TaxProfBlog:

Blogging can be a thankless and burdensome task. We should all be grateful for Dean Paul Caron's many year or service.

In 2011, while clerking on the Sixth Circuit, I entered the academic job market. At the time, I checked Paul Caron's TaxProfBlog regularly. Paul compiled information about VAPs, fellowships, and other aspects of academia. I reached out to Paul, and asked if he would meet. He graciously agreed!

I'll never forget the meeting. We caught up at a Starbucks near the campus of the University of Cincinnati. Who walks in, but the former mayor of Cincy: Jerry Springer. Yes, that Jerry Springer. Paul offered some invaluable advice about the academic market and how to approach the meat market. And Jerry offered some useful advice of how to handle conflicts at faculty meetings. (Okay, I made up the last point, but it would be hilarious to see Jerry manage a hiring meeting.)

Since then, I have been fortunate to keep Paul in my circle of contacts. I still read his blog daily, and often will email him about certain items he may wish to cover. Paul's output is staggering. He has published more than 55,000 posts, on top of his full-time job as a Dean! Paul also answers emails at all hours of the day, a remarkable feat. He doesn't miss a thing.

Alas, all good things come to an end. In 2023, I offered a requiem for SCOTUSBlog, which seemed destined to drift away, though thanks to a bizarre turn of events, it is not being bolstered by The Dispatch. But now, a pillar of the legal blogosphere will draw to a close. TypePad, the once-popular blogging software, is shutting down at the end of September. Paul has announced that he is shutting down TaxProfBlog. I will preserve his final post since the current page will soon vanish. ...

Blogging can be a thankless and burdensome task. We don't earn any actual income for doing it, and receive countless attacks from people who may never write any publicly. Indeed, social media for better or worse, has supplanted much of what made the legal blogosphere so important. I started blogging in the Fall of 2009, and still enjoy the process. But I do not write nearly as much as I used to, and I see diminishing returns.

We should all be grateful for Dean Paul Caron's many year or service. No one will replace him.

Steven Chung (Tax Attorney, Los Angeles), Goodbye To A Blogging Pioneer: Reflecting On The TaxProf Blog’s Legacy In A Changing Internet Era And Its Influence On One Tax Attorney:

Although many blogs [have] appeared on the net, most lasted only a short time before the number of posts faded and bloggers eventually shut them down or abandoned them. Only a few achieved consistent notability. One of them was the TaxProf blog, which Paul Caron — the current dean of Pepperdine Caruso School of Law — ran. While the blog catered to the tax and law school community, it stood out for its consistent release of relevant news alongside the occasional personal or religious post. If news appeared on the TaxProf Blog, it deserved a read.

On Monday, Caron announced that after 21 years and 55,780 posts, he would end the blog. He made the decision after learning that the platform hosting his blog would discontinue all blogs on September 30.

I think I first came across the TaxProf blog when I was a tax LLM student at Chapman School of Law. I was visiting the late Michael Lang during his office hours and I happened to notice the blog on his computer monitor. From that moment, I visited the TaxProf blog regularly. ...

I will miss the TaxProf Blog not just for the influence it had on me, but also because it represents one of a dying breed of blogs created as a “labor of love,” as Caron puts it. Blogs have given way to social media. Bloggers have morphed into influencers who care more about pleasing monetization algorithms, boosting view counts, or gaining followers. And commentators write in ways designed to troll or provoke reactions, rather than to make people think.

I am hopeful that algorithms of the future will put an end to clout chasing and reward those who provide useful information like the TaxProf Blog did for 21 years.

Law.com, Eulogy to a Blog: Paul Caron Ends TaxProf Blog:

On Monday morning, Paul Caron, creator of TaxProf blog, uploaded post number 55,782—his last one after posting daily for over 21 years. ...

Paul Caron has been what I call an anchor-person dean,” Danielle M. Conway, dean and Donald J. Farage Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law, told Law.com. “He has always been available to other deans, and the blog post is the embodiment of that availability.” He does the research and curation to provide information to people who are in decision-making positions, Conway said, but he also teaches everyone about what is happening in legal education, pulling from public documents that he summarizes in a transparent way. ...

Caron made the tough decision to end his blogging legacy that has brought him fame—sans fortune—verifiable by having received over 200 million page views over the past two decades.

It’s one of the few “email blasts” William Brewbaker III, dean and professor of law at the University of Alabama School of Law, said he has allowed in his inbox, adding, “I’m not aware of anything else quite like it.” He referred to Caron’s blog as “a ‘one-stop shop’ for news and commentary about things law professors and deans need to keep up with.... Paul’s own voice is also evident in the blog—the tax professor, the person of faith, the advocate for his beloved Pepperdine Law School,” Brewbaker added.

Michael Graetz, Justus S. Hotchkiss Professor Emeritus of Law and Professorial Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, told Law.com that he was "surprised—and impressed—"that Caron was able to continue it for so long given the responsibilities he had taken on as dean of Pepperdine. ... Paul’s blog has been a great service to tax professors, filled with useful information that otherwise would have been missed,” Graetz said. “He provided an extraordinary service for many years—one not easily replaced.”

“This is truly the end of an era,” Ruth Mason, Edwin S. Cohen Distinguished Professor of Law and Taxation at the University of Virginia School of Law, told Law.com. “For at least two decades, Paul Caron’s blog has been the source for news about tax legal academia.” “I will miss the blog, and I’m grateful to Paul for providing this service to the tax community,” she added.

“Paul is really an extraordinary guy in every aspect—as a dean, professor and scholar, which he has brought to the blog as a communicator of knowledge and information and insight across academia and even into practice,” Robert Ahdieh, dean and Anthony G. Buzbee Endowed Dean’s Chair at Texas A&M University School of Law, told Law.com, who also referred to Caron as “self-effacing, gracious and modest.” ...

“Paul Caron’s blog has been invaluable in legal education,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, told Law.com. “At a time when everything seems increasingly partisan, his blog was a neutral source of essential information for legal educators,” adding that he realized it was a “huge amount of work for him, but it was tremendously beneficial to all of us who learned by reading it.” ...

Caron said that he has always done most of the blog work on weekends, so “I would often tell my wife and children that I couldn't do something because I needed to ‘feed the beast,'" but "now that the beast is no more, I am looking forward to traveling more with my wife, including visiting our now adult children in Madison and Palo Alto.”

Reuters, Groundbreaking Law Blog Calls It Quits After 21 Years:

The 21-year-old TaxProf Blog founder and Pepperdine Law Dean Paul Caron announced on his soon-to-be defunct blog. ...

TaxProf Blog was an influential early entrant in the constellation of law professor blogs that flourished in the mid-2000s through the 2010s, before social media sites such as Twitter (now X) chipped away at their dominance. But TaxProf Blog remained relevant as others faded, serving as a digital water cooler for all of U.S. legal education.

In addition to posts on tax law [and legal education] ...  Caron threw in a smattering of posts on religion. “It is a big loss for us,” Boston University law dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig wrote in one of dozens of comments on Caron's farewell post. “To us in the legal academy, your blog was like day-to-day reporting of the sport of legal education.” ...

ABA Journal, Blogging Law Professors Consider Their Options After Web Host Shutdown; At Least One Is Calling It Quits:

The end-of-the-month shutdown of web hosting platform Typepad has blogging law professors scrambling to find a replacement or considering whether to shut down.

At least one legal educator has already made the decision to retire from blogging. He is Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law dean Paul Caron, co-founder of the Law Professor Blogs Network, which is closing with Typepad’s demise. ...

Caron informed members of the Law Professors Blog Network about the shutdown this week. He offered a tech support engineer to help transitioning to LexBlog, which has offered to host the law blogs.

“It has been an honor to serve as your ‘Blog Emperor’ through this remarkable chapter in self-publishing, the evolution of the internet, and legal education in America,” Caron wrote in his notice to members. “Thanks for your partnership all these years.”

• Legal Insurrection, Paul Caron is Shutting Down the TaxProf Blog
• National Jurist, TaxProf Blog Signs Off, Paul Caron Bids Farewell After 21 Years
• Vox PPLI, A Lighthouse at Midnight Goes Dark; A Sad Farewell to TaxLaw Blog.

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• The Determinants Of Faculty Pay
• Endean: Tariffs As Taxes — A Framework For Understanding Delegation Of The Taxing Power
• Chair Of The ABA Legal Ed Section Council: Training Better Lawyers
• Chicago-Kent Seeks To Hire A Tenured Or Tenure-Track Tax Prof

Sunday:

• NY Times Op-Ed: What I Told My Students At Church About Death After Yet Another School Shooting
• Finding God In Dementia
• In Defense Of ‘Thoughts And Prayers’ When Tragedy Strikes
• Is The Rise Of AI A Real Threat To Associate Jobs?
• Are Law Schools Failing Students In The World of AI?
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

New York Times Op-Ed:  What I Told My Sunday School Students About Death, by Anne Lamott (Author, Somehow: Thoughts on Love (2024)):

I was a Sunday school teacher for 30-plus years, until recently, in a small liberal church in Northern California that rose out of the civil rights movement. I learned early on that when you have a lot of poor kids as students, you get to know tragedy up close — addicted or dead parents, shootings, the injuries and mortification of racism and poverty. So we talked more about tragedy than you might expect.

I never tried to comfort them with nice Christian bumper sayings or platitudes, especially after school shootings like the one at the back-to-school Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. “Hey, kids. Yay! God’s got a plan! Phew.” Still, we did believe that death was a pretty major change of address and that God caught the children as they left this life.

But when we read in the Hebrew Bible that weeping may last the night and that joy comes in the morning, I explained that this does not mean literally at dawn, like a new bike from Walmart. We’re talking long dark nights of the soul. And the psalmist didn’t mean joy joy, like Pop Rocks and the Village People. He meant relief and peace, eventually.

There should be one inviolable rule: Children are not shot or starved to death.

Driving to church after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, I remembered a commentator saying that the measure of a nation is how many small coffins it allows. ... I always took my kids out to our small and slightly chaotic classroom midway through the adult service. They followed me like ducklings because they had been sprung and there would be snacks.

On that specific Sunday, ... I started by asking them how they were doing in the face of the ghastly news out of Uvalde. They were pretty quiet. “OK,” one said. “Fine,” said another.

The rule of life is that the innocent suffer. Horrible people get away with horrible things. I asked them what their classroom teachers had them do the day after the shootings. A teenager mentioned shooter drills — “Run, hide, fight.”

This pierced me. I couldn’t stand seeing how helpless all of them felt. With so little to offer, I told them once again what Mr. Rogers’s mother told him: In the face of tragedy, look toward the helpers. That’s where we see goodness and sacrifice, and these give us hope. Let there be light, and let it begin with me. ...

After one school shooting, my beloved rabbi friend Sydney Mintz told me a story from the Midrash (a collection of stories about what the Hebrew Bible teaches). When Moses smashed the original tablets with the Ten Commandments and stomped off back to Mount Sinai, someone swept up all the shards. They were eventually added to the ark alongside the replacement copy of the commandments.

We drag around our brokenness in the same container as our holiness.

Anger and murder have always been our lot and are going to keep happening. One of Adam and Eve’s sons killed another, and we still see this every day. It’s real, and all you can choose is how you’re going to react. Do you close yourself off, as if that will protect you, or do you try to stay open and get to work in the world?

The parents gathered around me that day to ask how they could talk to their kids about the shooting. Talk about love, I said, and listen. They asked: Was there meaning? No, not yet.

Other op-eds by Anne Lamott:

• What To Expect When You Have Expectations (Jan. 5, 2025)
• Living For The Unremarkable Moments (Sept. 8, 2024)
• Do Not Mess With The Very Old (Aug. 4, 2024)
• Gentle Is The Joy That Comes With Age (July 7, 2024)
• Invisible And Exposed — But Adaptable, As Only The Old Can Be (June 9, 2024)
• The Dressing Room Encounter That Made Me Get Real About Aging (June 2, 2024)
• Lifelong Lessons In Coping With Fear And Humiliation (May 19, 2024)
• It’s Not So ‘Terribly Strange To Be 70’ (Apr. 21, 2024)
• The Two Best Gifts Of Aging? Softness And Illumination.  (Mar. 17, 2024)
• A Superpower of Older Age: Powerlessness (Mar. 3, 2024)
• Age Makes The Miracles Easier To See (Jan. 28, 2024)
• At 33, I Knew Everything. At 69, I Know Something Much More Important (Nov. 26, 2023)
• It’s Good to Remember: We Are All On Borrowed Time (Nov. 3, 2023)
• I Pray. But I Don’t Want To See A High School Football Coach Praying At The 50-Yard Line. (July 10, 2022)

Editor's Note:  If you would like to receive a weekly email each Sunday with links to faith posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here. 

Jen Pollock Michel (Christianity Today; Author, In Good Time: 8 Habits for Reimagining Productivity, Resisting Hurry, and Practicing Peace (2023)), Finding God in Dementia:

Waving goodbye, I watch the glass doors close. On the other side, my mother stands red-faced, tears streaming, in the lobby of her assisted living community. Our family has a habit of damming up grief, but this is a pain neither of us can contain. I am crying too.

I leave my mother like this on the day I am tasked with delivering difficult news. On the advice of her physician and care team, my mother—officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s two and a half years earlier—will be moving to the memory care floor. The move means admitting that she can no longer safely live without assistance. It means her Alzheimer’s is taking her into the deep end.

Everyone agrees this is the right choice, but that doesn’t ease my conscience. Am I acting prematurely to agree to the life-altering arrangement? Even after some desperate internet searches, it’s clear there is no objective measure of my mother’s readiness for the next level of care. The fog of my indecision mimics her own descending darkness, and I pray for a sign. It isn’t granted. ...

If I’m being honest, I do not know whose story this is. My mother and I are not the separate selves we imagine ourselves to be. Our stories were tangled from the womb, where boundaries between mother and baby are difficult to establish. In that secret place where God knit my inward parts, I drew life and breath from my mother’s body, and her health was my health. Is it still? ...

Alzheimer’s is the crooked line in Ecclesiastes 1:15 that can’t be made straight. There will be no healing for my mother this side of the veil. The darkness of dementia descends, and we cannot penetrate it. ...

As my mother’s ability to tell her own story diminishes, I am becoming the keeper of her memories, for better or for worse. And as I tell her story—to you and to others—I realize I might also be telling my own. If I now beg God for mercy on her behalf, am I not, at least in part, pleading for myself? ...

I watch as my mother’s days grow increasingly confined; she spends more and more time in bed. I would be lying if I said it was easy to believe what theologian John Swinton asserts: “Lives that are touched by profound forms of dementia have meaning and continuing purpose.” It seems blindly idealistic in the face of something so devastating. ...

What good can God intend for these days that travel the short distances from bedroom to bathroom to dining room to activity room? What good can God intend for my mother to forget her two previous husbands, her son, her grandchildren, and occasionally even me?

The story of forgetfulness is written in the unraveling of my mother’s once-capable life, but for her part, she expresses very little fear over the loose threads. ...

On the October day we tell my mother she is moving to the memory care unit, her caregiving team and I sell the change with clever half-truths. There are so many more activities! There are wonderful new people you’ll get to know! We describe the “concierge” services that will soon be available to her: laundry, housekeeping, weekly manicures.

My mother is, at first, nonplussed. Our efforts at spin are, I think, largely successful—until the two of us are back in her apartment later that afternoon, and the stark truth of it all crashes in.

“What’s wrong?” I ask when she turns toward me sadly, an empty hanger in her hand.

“It’s just so much change all at once,” she says. “Why does everything have to keep changing?”

When I remember that moment now, it strikes me how much I hear echoes of Jesus’ words to Peter, foretelling the kind of death the disciple would face:

Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go. (John 21:18)

As the glass doors close between us when I leave later that day, I’m comforted that, at the very least, hers is a kind of end that Jesus himself knows.

The losses of dementia strike at the very capacities we are tempted to consider most deeply human: our language, our thinking, our memory. But rather than seeing it as a totalizing story of loss, the gospel invites us to consider the goods that flourish in the context of human weakness.

As much as we wish it were not so, we cannot straighten the crooked lines of human disease. Some sufferings are inexplicable this side of the eschaton. But we can remember that God is present with us, working out good, even in our most profound experiences of suffering.

I see God at work as my mother and I are engaged in a holy, human task: she in the dying, I in the giving of care that makes her dying easier.

Dementia, at the very least, reminds us of what it means to be human. We are fragile, finite creatures. We cannot self-exist or self-sustain. We depend on God for our very lives, but we are also deeply dependent on each other to offer the companionship and care that helps us both live and die.

Those losing their memories are teaching us about our mutual need, and those like my mother, who have cultivated a lifetime of deep faith in Jesus, are quietly inviting us into the way of the saint.

Recently, when we pick my mother up for church, as we do each Sunday, I see a tender bruise of blue above her eye. My first thought is that she fell—one symptom of dementia. When I reach out my hand to touch the bruise, though, it smears: eyeshadow.

She doesn’t remember putting it there. As I wipe her face, she gives herself peaceably into my hands. That submission is a gift I don’t take for granted. I receive it, and I pray for gentler hands. Having practiced presence with her these last two years, I am thankful I can now receive my mother as she is, honoring the best memories of who she once was.

These days, when I stoop to zip my mother’s coat, I go all the way down and kneel, the way she must have once done for me when I was little. I’ve come to assume it as a posture of prayer, saying the words of a liturgy from Every Moment Holy, Volume II:

Let me love well this one who suffers. Let me again and again choose love in each moment, so that through every small act of care and mercy the practice of love becomes a liturgy and a habit by which you are forming in me a compassion that cannot be learned any other way, save by the giving of myself in long service to another.

As I pray, I craft a new vision of my mother, myself, and the story we’re living together.

Genes are not the only thing my mother has given me. I remember how every morning, as a child, I would shuffle down to the kitchen and find her head bent over her Bible in prayer. She faithfully prayed for me on the days I didn’t know how—a generational gift of surpassing worth—and now I pray for her.

Even though she may have forgotten those mornings, and someday I may too, God will not. And when she and I awake someday into the new world, God will wipe away each tear as we remember.

This is the story we are both living: tragic, but not left unredeemed or unrecorded. From the very beginning, before we drew our first breath, in God’s book were written the days that were formed for us, every one of them. Our story is, in the end, his.

How precious are the thoughts of God; how vast the sum of his remembering. Today, it is enough for me to know this, both for myself and for my mother.

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Dispatch Faith:  In Defense of Thoughts and Prayers, by Jonah Goldberg (The Dispatch):

“Prayer is not freaking enough,” MSNBC host and former Biden press secretary  Jen Psaki declared on X after the horrifying church shooting in Minneapolis .... “Prayers does not end school shootings. prayers do not make parents feel safe sending their kids to school. Prayer does not bring these kids back. Enough with the thoughts and prayers.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey expressed similar sentiments. “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now,” he said during an impassioned press conference on Wednesday. “These kids were literally praying.”

This contempt for offering “thoughts and prayers” after a mass shooting has been something of an automatic rejoinder on the progressive left for a while. And I think it’s a grave mistake. 

Before I explain why, let me be clear that I have immense sympathy for the sincere frustration and anger that motivates such outbursts. Words fail to express how much I agree with the proposition that these atrocities should not happen. It’s such an agonizingly inadequate thing to say, but parents should not endure the horror of wondering whether their child was one of the kids slaughtered while at church. The feeling that your child is in peril, that doubt, that bottomless void of fear and worry that vacuums the soul until you feel like you will implode—even that cannot compare to the horror of actually losing a child to such senseless and evil violence. I don’t know that from experience, thank God, but as a parent, my imagination can get me to the precipice of that abyss.

That mass shootings are too common is such an irrefutably and infuriatingly obvious opinion that it feels pathetic even to offer it. Any number of mass shootings above zero is, in a very real sense, intolerable. Indeed, any number of murders is intolerable. ...

[W]hen the recent floods in Texas swept away dozens of children, millions offered messages of support on social media or in person. It’s simply a decent thing to do. But when natural disasters strike, few say in their aftermath, “Don’t give me your thoughts and prayers, do something about flooding.” ...

The fundamental problem with condemning “thoughts and prayers” is that it tries to snuff out a basic decency and skip straight to a policy argument. It suggests that people cannot show the most minimal kindness and expression of social solidarity to their fellow citizens unless they agree with their preferred policies.

Again, my point here is not to debate the merits of any particular policy proposal. On that front, the details matter—and so does the Constitution. But it is not clear to me that hectoring and shaming people who offer their thoughts and prayers in heartfelt sympathy gets the hectorers and shamers one inch closer to their preferred outcome. ...

Whatever the right policy responses are for dealing with these intolerably frequent horrors may be, they all begin with more concern for our fellow humans afflicted by them. 

• Brandon Ambrosino (Villanova), In Defense of the ‘Thoughts and Prayers’ Offered Up After Mass Shootings
• Jack Figge (Benedictine College), In The Wake of Tragedy, Is Prayer Enough? The Church Says Yes.
• Madeline Holcombe (CNN), What Happens After ‘Thoughts and Prayers’? These Religious Leaders Have an Answer
• Greg Laurie (Harvest), Christian Perspective on Prayer in Tragedy
• Joseph Shaw (Catholic.com), In Defense of Prayers in Tragedy

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Law.com, Is the Rise of AI a Real Threat to Associate Jobs?:

While the rising investment in artificial intelligence has brought along concerns and predictions about the technology's potential to replace associate jobs, some say the role will instead adapt and evolve alongside the rapidly growing technology.

A recent survey from admissions consulting firm Juris Education revealed that one in five pre-law students fear artificial intelligence could replace their jobs in the future.

Meanwhile, 34% of junior associate lawyers asked about the biggest threat to their legal career this year cited technology replacing humans, according to The American Lawyer's 2025 Midlevel Associates Technology Survey.

Is this fear realistic?

Some legal recruiters have said the rise of AI will almost certainly reduce the need for junior associates.

David Nicol, head of legal recruiting group Marsden’s U.S. practice, recently told The American Lawyer, “It’s pretty clear that the size and structure of law firms is going to change, and I don’t really see a future going forward where you’re going to require as many junior associates.”

Dale Durham, managing director of legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa’s associate practice group, also noted AI tools equate to added client value, which could come at the expense of slightly leaner associate classes.

Despite these predictions, others say this is simply a turning point for the legal sector.

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Bloomberg Law, Are Law Schools Failing Students in the World of AI?:

The legal industry is investing in generative artificial intelligence, but are future lawyers going to be up to speed when they enter the workforce?

Last fall, I wrote that law schools would likely increase their teachings of generative AI and incorporate the technology into standard legal education due to industry demand, based on results from Bloomberg Law’s Path to Practice Survey conducted during the 2023-2024 school year. The survey results showed that law schools included AI in elective courses and other secondary programs, yet there was a lag in doctrinal or required coursework. I reasoned that we would begin to see more standardized AI courses based on industry demand.

But what has happened since? Based on more recent Path to Practice Survey results from the 2024-2025 school year, law schools responded to some of the demand we saw in the prior survey, but much less so than before, even as legal industry demand has increased.

Overwhelming Industry Demand
Although slightly more lawyers reported using generative AI for work tasks in the second Path to Practice survey (46%) than they did in the first one (40%), a vast majority still think that law students should be using the technology. Almost 80% of the lawyers surveyed in the 2024–2025 school year (compared to 84% in the 2023–2024 school year) said that law students should be learning AI....

Weaker Response from Law Schools
There’s a growing expectation that law students learn how to use AI, yet law schools aren’t meeting that demand, according to the survey data. In fact, there has been a large decrease in reported overall AI course offerings. ...

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This week's list of the Top 5 Recent Tax Paper Downloads is the same as last week's list. The #1 paper is #376 among 12,243 tax papers in all-time downloads.

1. [1089 Downloads]  Revoking Tax Exemption for Pursuit of DEI and Other Alleged Forms of Discrimination, by Ellen P. Aprill (Loyola-L.A.; Google Scholar)
2. [600 Downloads]  Rule of Law v. Rule of Power: US Tax Defense Measures in Light of the International Law of Countermeasures, by Błażej Kuźniacki (Lazarski; Google Scholar) & Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan; Google Scholar)
3. [414 Downloads]  Understanding the Tax Provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, by Samuel Donaldson (Georgia State; Google Scholar)
4. [348 Downloads]  Federal Tax Procedure (2025), by Jack Townsend (Houston)
5. [195 Downloads]  The Black Hole of Capital Gains: ETF Swap Funds, by Jeffrey Colon (Fordham)

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Michelle Lowry (Drexel), Daniel Bradley (South Florida), April M. Knill (South Carolina) & Jared Williams (South Florida), What Are We Paid For? The Determinants of Business Faculty Pay:

We examine the determinants of business school faculty pay, using detailed data on compensation, research, teaching, and administrative service. We estimate that a top-tier journal publication is worth $116,000, with significant variation across disciplines. Second-tier publications are worth one-third as much, and other publications have no impact. Further analysis of salaries and cross-discipline publication records suggests that researchers are compensated based on the journals they publish in rather than the departments they belong to. Conference presentations and teaching evaluations have significant but smaller effects than top-tier publications. Faculty administrators earn a premium, with department chairs receiving 11-35% and deans 58-94%.

Post-Covid-19, real faculty pay has fallen more than in comparable fields and the sensitivity of pay to research performance has weakened.

(Hat Tip: Kim Krawiec)

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Legal Education:

1. New Orleans Times-Picayune, LSU Law School Moves On From Dean Alena Allen After Only 3 Years; She Alleges Discrimination And Retaliation For Raising Concerns About Financial Irregularities
2. Press Release, Legal AI Company Harvey Launches Law School Academic Program With Michigan, Notre Dame, NYU, Stanford, Texas, And UCLA
3. Lael Weinberger (George Mason), Liberals And Conservatives Agree: The ABA Should Not Have A Monopoly On Law School Accreditation
4. SFGATE, Big Changes Could Be Coming To A Small Silicon Valley Law School
5. America First Legal, Remove The ABA From The Law School Accreditation Process In Ohio
6. Journal of Legal Education, Publication of New Issue
7. Insider Higher Ed, Law Schools Embrace AI
8. Colin Crawford (Dean, Arkansas-Little Rock), Update: Arkansas-Little Rock Law School
9. Name, Legal Ed News Roundup
10. Business Insider, 33% Of The Curriculum Should Be AI

Editor's Note:  If you would like to receive a daily email with links to legal education posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.

Tax:

1. Doron Narotzki (Akron), The Hidden Tax Game
2. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Prof Moves, 2025-26
3. Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan), Doron Narotzki (Akron) & Domenico Imparato (Hamburg), No Trade Wars Without Taxation: Who's to Blame, and What Comes Next?
4. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: Grab That Apple!
5. Emmanuel Saez (UC-Berkeley) & Gabriel Zucman (UC-Berkeley) at al., How Much Do U.S. Billionaires Pay?
6. Tax Prof Jobs
1. Boston College
2. Chicago-Kent
3. Georgia State
4. Loyola-L.A.
5. Notre Dame
6. Seton Hall
7. Washington & Lee
7. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers
8. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Policy In The Trump Administration
9. Bloomberg, Top IRS Lawyer Pick Poised For Second Act At Besieged Tax Agency
10. Lauren van Schilfgaarde (UCLA), Civilized Enough to Tax: Natives as Federal Income Taxpayers

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Faith:

1. Newport This Week, George Washington's Letter To The Hebrew Congregation In Newport, Rhode Island
2. Will Rahn (The Free Press), Trump's Plan To Conquer Heaven
3. Russell Moore (Christianity Today), Advice for Donald Trump on Getting into Heaven
4. Joe Nocera (The Free Press), Could ‘Hamilton’ Be Made Today?
5. Rustin Dodd (New York Times), Leadership Lessons For Coaches (And Deans) In Difficult Situations: Authenticity, Humor, And Dad Jokes
   David Brooks (New York Times), Faith May Be The Cure For Right-Wing Nihilism

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