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Pepperdine Caruso Law Welcomes New Faculty Members in the 2022-23 Academic Year

CSOL new faculty 2022-23

Pepperdine Caruso Law is pleased to welcome four new faculty members joining us in August,  whose teaching and research focus on areas of law including the Second Amendment, the treatment of marginalized populations, criminal law, and tax law. Included in this distinguished group are tenure-track faculty and our first Pepperdine Caruso Family Law Fellow.

Jake Charles, who writes and teaches on the Second Amendment and firearms law, comes to Pepperdine from Duke University School of Law where he served as the inaugural executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law and remains an affiliated scholar. Charles earned a B.A. in criminology, law and society, and psychology and social behavior from the University of California, Irvine; M.A. degrees in theology and philosophy from Biola University; and his J.D. from Duke Law School. His most recent article, Securing Gun Rights By Statute: The Right to Keep and Bear Arms Outside the Constitution is forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review.

Mary Hoopes, whose research examines how legal and political institutions serve marginalized populations, joins us from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she was the Director of Research at the Berkeley Judicial Institute. Hoopes earned a B.S. at the University of Notre Dame, her J.D. from Cornell Law School, and a Ph.D. from Berkeley Law. At Pepperdine, Hoopes will serve as the co-director of the Wm. Matthew Byrne, Jr. Judicial Clerkship Institute. Her most recent article, Regulating Marginalized Labor, is forthcoming in the Hastings Law Journal.

Joel Johnson comes to Caruso Law from the U.S. Department of Justice, where he served as an attorney in the Criminal Appellate Section. Johnson is an experienced Supreme Court and appellate litigator, as well as a legal scholar whose research focuses on constitutional limits on substantive criminal law and explores the implications of those limits for statutory interpretation, criminal procedure, and federal courts. Johnson earned a B.A. at Belmont University and his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. His most recent article, Dealing with Dead Crimes, is forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal.

Deanna Newton will join us as the first Pepperdine Caruso Family Law Fellow. The fellowship program is designed to assist attorneys with backgrounds that are historically underrepresented in the legal academy to pursue a full-time legal academic tenure-track career. In her two-year appointment, Newton will focus her teaching and scholarship on international tax and tax policy. Newton earned her B.A. at Loyola Marymount University, her J.D. at Pepperdine Caruso Law, and her LL.M. in tax law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. While a student at Pepperdine, she helped to form the Low Income Taxpayer Clinic, located in the Union Rescue Mission on Skid Row in Los Angeles. The clinic represents low-income taxpayers in collection matters with the Internal Revenue Service and the California Franchise Tax Board.