Edley Center Faculty

Minnesota should investigate and prosecute the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. State and local governments have the authority to prosecute federal officials who violate state law when their conduct is “objectively unreasonable.”

“The Supreme Court has made a mess of the law concerning the Second Amendment,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

In this interview, Professor Daniel Farber discusses when political leaders choose to break the rules meant to restrain them — and what truly stops them.

“If he carries out his threat to cut off funds to jurisdictions that resist his immigration policies, President Donald Trump will violate the Constitution,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“There is a strong tradition of not using the military for policing in the United States. The image of soldiers roving the streets is something we see in countries with authoritarian governments, not this country,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Police — and not soldiers — are trained to respect constitutional rights in policing and to use deadly force only if necessary.”

“When politicians, not instructors, control what is taught, academic freedom is dead,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“Freedom of speech by instructors must be protected, but it is not absolute and the 9th Circuit here misapplied the law in finding constitutional protection for expression where none was warranted,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“What will be the fate of Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, the Supreme Court’s 2020 landmark ruling protecting gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals from employment discrimination?” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky in his Courtly Observations column. “Over the last year, the court has failed to follow the logic of Bostock in upholding discrimination against transgender individuals.”

“If Renee Good had been killed by a state or local police officer rather than an ICE agent, her family could sue the shooter for excessive force and violating her rights,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But there is no law that allows federal officers to be sued for their constitutional violations.”

Catherine Lhamon, executive director of the Edley Center and CLEE Executive Director Louise Bedsworth hosted a panel  entitled “Science, Democracy, and the Environment: Developing a Community of Practice for Strategy and Action,” which  highlighted what might be the path to a more scientifically informed democratic future.

“The most important question for our democracy in 2026 is whether there will be meaningful checks on President Donald Trump,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

It remains a legally thorny question about “whether prohibiting schools, including teachers and staff, from informing parents violates the right of parents to control the upbringing of their children,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. Chemerinsky criticized the ruling and said it should be vulnerable to an appeal. All the same, “the question is how to balance the parents’ rights against the speech interests and autonomy of the children.”

“The invasion of Venezuela shows how far we have come from being a nation under a Constitution based on checks and balances,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It is imperative that Congress reassert its constitutional powers.” 

“Ultimately, the question is whether the Supreme Court will check a president who, in the words of his chief of staff, feels he can do anything,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Nothing was more important in 2025, or is likely to be more important in 2026, than this.”

“In one of its most consequential rulings of the year, just before breaking for the holidays last week the Supreme Court held that President Trump acted improperly in federalizing the National Guard in Illinois and in activating troops across the state,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Although the case centered on the administration’s deployments in Chicago, the court’s ruling suggests that Trump’s actions in Los Angeles and Portland were likewise illegal.”

“I and others have extensively written about the assault on the rule of law,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But we have not spoken enough about the war on compassion. We are better than this as a country and must demand better from the president.”

“What, if any, is the lasting legacy of Bush v. Gore, which was decided 25 years ago, on Dec. 12, 2000?,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It is a case that never has been cited in a majority opinion and thus seems to matter little in the law. Rather, the decision’s largest significance may be from the widespread perception that the justices were simply motivated by their own partisan preferences as to who should be the next president.”

The way to oppose Mr. Trump’s era of corrupt deal making is to present the American people with a clear and principled alternative. Voters must enforce objective anti-corruption principles at the ballot box, by prioritizing candidates’ opposition to corruption and rejecting representatives of any party who participate in or tolerate any sort of the corrupt dealing and assault on the justice system, write J.P. Cooney and Molly Gaston, senior fellows at Berkeley Law’s Edley Center for Law and Democracy.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Catherine Lhamon, executive director Edley Center on Law and Democracy comment on the legality of the Trump administration’s freezing of hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“It’s unprecedented to use the military for domestic law enforcement in this way, and there’s a long tradition against federalizing state guards for domestic law enforcement,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law.

“None of us benefit from making professional and graduate schools just for the rich,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinksy. “We all suffer when talented individuals who would be great doctors, nurses, lawyers, social workers and professors are kept from attending school because they cannot afford the tuition and the money is not there to borrow.”

“It is hard to imagine a worse decision than the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday allowing Texas to use its new congressional maps designed to elect five more Republicans to the House of Representatives,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinksy.

“It was not that long ago that the unitary executive theory was emphatically rejected in Morrison v. Olson in an opinion by Rehnquist, himself a conservative,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinksy. “The court’s current majority seems ready to undo Rehnquist’s work on that front, and to embrace Scalia’s dissent in Morrison calling for a more powerful presidency.”

“The fate of Texas’ and perhaps California’s recent redistricting — and thus the political composition of the House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections — turns on a principle of law that’s never made much sense before and makes absolutely no sense now,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

The fate of successful gerrymandering efforts in California and Texas now comes down to a slate of high-profile court cases. Dean Erwin Chemerinsky weighs in.

“Truthful speech is protected by the First Amendment and should not be the basis for accusing people of sedition, let alone threatening the death penalty,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“The speech Trump is criticizing simply states the law: soldiers are not to follow unconstitutional or illegal orders,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley Law. “The accusation is unfounded and unnecessarily chills criticism of the President’s actions.”

“Although many criticisms have been made of the Supreme Court’s rulings on its emergency docket, one that has not received enough attention is the court’s failure to follow well-established principles for staying a preliminary injunction, which – while it may sound technical – has enormous importance,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinksy. “This has been evident in many shadow docket decisions, but was particularly evident in the court’s Nov. 6 ruling in Trump v. Orr.”

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled against transgender individuals this year, allowing bans on military service, healthcare and identity recognition,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “With key cases on transgender athletes approaching, the Court shows little inclination to protect them from discrimination.” 

“Like the Trojan princess whose accurate prophesies were doomed to be disbelieved, dire warnings of the justices about American democracy are going unheeded,” write Dean Erwin Chemerinksy and Lisa Tucker, professor of law at Drexel University.

“Ultimately, I believe the guardrail of our democracy has to be the courts and the Supreme Court,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said. “If there is going to be a check on a president who has authoritarian impulses, it’s going to have to be from the restraints of the Constitution—and the only way we can enforce those is the courts.”

“The Supreme Court’s ruling allowing the Trump administration to require that passports reflect a person’s sex at birth is both mean-spirited and wrong as a matter of law,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

UC Berkeley law professor Daniel Farber and Ethan Elkind, who directs the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment weigh in whether or not California could go it alone if the federal government stops regulating greenhouse gases. 

David Carrillo, executive director at Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center and Assistant Professor Emily Rong Zhang comment on California Republican’s constitutional challenge to the state’s newly approved congressional maps.

Emily Rong Zhang, an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, said redistricting has long been a “wild west” of the US democratic system. “It’s brute force politics where the fights are some of the dirtiest.”

“We are unlikely to ever know whether one or more of the amicus briefs changed any justices’ minds,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinksy. “But we also never can know in advance whether a merits brief or an oral argument made a difference. All lawyers can do is make the best arguments they can and hope they persuade the court.”

“The two tariff cases before the Supreme Court this week should thus be easy ones, including for the conservative justices,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But will they follow the law and their traditional approaches to it, or are they just a rubber stamp for Team Trump?”

While law enforcement officers enjoy substantial legal protections for their conduct while on duty, Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and a constitutional law expert, told us that federal officers can be criminally prosecuted for unreasonable conduct that violates the law.

“In reading the briefs, there is a sense that the challengers of the tariffs are making arguments that usually appeal to the conservative justices: follow the plain text of the statute, eschew allowing broad delegations of congressional power, restrict the ability of the executive branch to rule on major questions without clear guidance from Congress,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinksy.

“If an ICE agent uses excessive force in apprehending or detaining a person, the agent can be sued under California tort law for battery and potentially even criminally prosecuted under state law,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“I think the ICE agents can be sued, for battery, for excessive force, in state court, and I think they can be similarly prosecuted,” said UC Berkeley Law’s Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “If ICE agents act beyond their legal authority, and violate state law in doing so, they can be prosecuted.”

“It always should be troubling for the court to decide empirical questions without actual evidence,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But it should be especially disturbing for the court to strike down or narrow a vital civil rights statute based on a group of justices’ intuition that race discrimination in voting is largely a thing of the past.”

“My hope is that the United States Supreme Court will come to the same conclusion, and we have to expect that President Trump will comply with the court order because every president in history has done so,” Chemerinsky said. “On the other hand, what President Trump is doing and using the troops and so much else, is unprecedented in American history.”

“The Posse Comitatus Act limits what the military — or those engaged in federal military service — can do,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean at UC Berkeley. “It does not apply to state forces. That is governed by state law.”

“By opening investigations with accusatory quotations from department officials and their allies, the Trump administration is putting its thumb on the scale,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, UC Berkeley Law’s Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy.

“Historically, over decades, families have been able to come to the federal government and get relief without hiring an attorney,” Catherine E. Lhamon, UC Berkeley Law’s Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy told USA TODAY. “These cuts ensure that no family can rely on that.”

“OCR could not afford any cuts, period, and needed desperately to add staff because of the quantum of harm in schools with respect to civil rights and the many, many thousands of cases coming into the office,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, UC Berkeley Law’s Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy. “Nothing has changed about that.”

“We don’t live under a king in this country. We don’t give unilateral authority to the President to make decisions about every walk of life for all Americans,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, UC Berkeley Law’s Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy. “This President is operating as if we do.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky joins Law.com’s Supreme Court Brief podcast to discuss the stakes of the October 2025 Supreme Court term.

“If law enforcement personnel take somebody and arrest them, law enforcement personnel need to let them know that they have been arrested,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It’s the only way for somebody to know that they haven’t been kidnapped. And so when ICE agents in masks without identification are taking people into custody, that shouldn’t be deemed a lawful arrest.”