OpEds

“Chiles v. Salazar is not the first time the Supreme Court has had to deal with a First Amendment challenge to laws that regulate speech by professionals in advising clients and patients,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “What is striking about the decisions is their inconsistency.”

“Senate Democrats are absolutely right in doing everything they can, including holding up funding for the Department of Homeland Security, to impose limits on behavior by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But it is not enough.”

“However unpopular such companies are at the moment, they are being held liable for their speech and that is unconstitutional,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“Conservative justices constantly say the Constitution should be interpreted based on history and its text and its original meaning,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinksy. “All of these sources make the Trump executive order on birthright citizenship unconstitutional. The Supreme Court decision should be unanimous in striking it down.”

“Ever since the Supreme Court recognized birthright citizenship in 1898,  generations of Americans have accepted that the United States Constitution encodes an absolute rule that if someone is born on U.S. soil, they are a citizen, end of story,” writes Professor Amanda Tyler. “But fringe elements of American society have repeatedly tried to attack this fundamental rule.” 

“With all the political debate around cost-of-living, policymakers need to tell the whole story about housing costs,” writes Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.

“The fate of the SAVE Act in Congress is uncertain despite the strong pressures from Trump,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But if enacted, it is sure to be challenged in the courts. While requiring photo identification for voting would likely be upheld, requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote seems clearly unconstitutional.”

“As is so often the case with ballot initiatives, Uber’s Protecting Automobile Accident Victims from Attorney Self-Dealing Act is being promoted in a very misleading manner, as if it will help automobile accident victims,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “In reality, it just will help businesses like Uber and automobile insurance companies.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinksy and Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy weigh in on Trump v. Cook and whether the President has the authority to remove a Federal Reserve Board governor.

“The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, aggressively championed by President Donald Trump, would be an unconstitutional restriction on the right to vote that would keep many citizens from voting—with little benefit for our electoral system,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinksy.

“President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have badly abused their authority in an effort to punish AI company Anthropic for not capitulating to their demands,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It is one thing for the government to decline to contract with a company based on a disagreement over terms. It is something quite different — and illegal and unconstitutional — for the government to use its enormous power to retaliate against a company because of disagreement in a contract dispute.”

“In a state where the next outage is never far away, EVs offer something rare: cleaner air and greater resilience,” writes Ken Alex, director, Project Climate at CLEE. “California should stop treating them as a risk — and start using them as the grid solution they already are.”

Professor John Yoo weighs in on the Supreme Court’s decision on tariffs.

“The greatest significance of the tariffs decision is that it shows a court willing to say no to Trump on a significant issue,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“Federal grand jurors are showing that they will use their power wisely,” write Criminal Law and Justice Center Executive Director Chesa Boudin and UC Davis Professor Eric S. Fish. “We should embrace this trend and give them the procedural protections they need to serve as true checks on government power.”

“Although social media companies are in many ways villains that have not done nearly enough to protect children on their platforms, they nonetheless should not be held liable based on claims that they are creating addictive and harmful online environments,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

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.”

“Protecting youths online will be the defining internet policy battle of 2026,” writes Professor Catherine Crump.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky offers his perspective on the two Fourth Amendment cases before the Supreme Court.

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

“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.”

“In times of financial abundance, universities are often willing to support innovative, interdisciplinary programs that align with their goals,” write Berkeley Law Professor Alexa Koenig and Utrect University Professor Brianne McGonigle Leyh. “But during periods of austerity, such as the severe budget cuts currently affecting Dutch higher education or the United States’ open hostility to university-based research—especially on human rights and humanitarian issues— these initiatives are among the first to lose funding.”

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

“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 U.S. Supreme Court seems likely to shake up American copyright law by articulating a different—and likely a stricter—legal standard for what constitutes contributory copyright infringement in the Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment case,” writes Professor Pamela Samuelson.

“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.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky weighs in on two SCOTUS cases that are likely to substantially change the law as to when the president can fire those in the executive branch of government. 

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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?”

“Many states, including California, consider the race of voters in drawing their political maps,” write David Carrillo, executive director and Stephen M. Duvernay, a senior research fellow at Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center. “They do this to prevent minority votes from being dispersed and diluted, as Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act forbids. In Louisiana v. Callais, the high court will decide whether a state’s intentional consideration of race to create these majority-minority voting districts violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.”

“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.

“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.”

“If court orders can be defied, then the president can violate the Constitution and any law with impunity knowing that there are unlikely to be any meaningful consequences,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “That means the president could then do anything — including locking up critics — knowing that the courts are powerless to stop it.”

“Beyond the unconstitutional aspects of the compact, there is its odious demand to intrude on the autonomy of these schools,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Every aspect of it seeks to dictate decisions that have traditionally been left to each university — a degree of control over higher education that is characteristic of authoritarian countries.”

“In all my decades spent closely following Supreme Court decisions, I’ve never before felt one term had the potential to be so momentous in deciding the future of American democracy,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“AB 288 protects fundamental constitutional rights of Californians at a time when the federal government is failing,” writes Professor Catherine Fisk and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It is a commonsense measure that builds on the established practice enabling unions and employers to come together under a stable and predictable set of rules to bargain collectively.”