Press Highlights

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.

“The job of the Office for Civil Rights is to protect all people,” said Catherine Lhamon, who served as assistant secretary of education for civil rights during the Biden administration and now works at UC Berkeley Law School. “This administration is picking and choosing who it will protect.”

“The highly polluting diesel trucks that dominate California’s roads account for 25% of the state’s on-road greenhouse gas emissions and 35% of transportation-caused nitrogen oxide emissions,” write Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program and Marie Grimm an environmental policy research fellow at UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment “They also contribute to asthma and other public health harms, particularly in low-income communities near shipping centers and highways.”

“One way to think of this case is a clash between broader cultural perceptions of harassment post-#MeToo movement,” said Russell Robinson, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has expertise in anti-discrimination law, “where I think a lot of people — especially women — would read the allegations and say, ‘that’s inappropriate.’”

“But I think for courts,” he said, “the standard for harassment is much more demanding than the general public perception of what’s appropriate or inappropriate.”

“Masked police are common in foreign countries with authoritarian governments,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Police officers there want to hide their identity to prevent being held accountable for their misconduct. But masked police do not exist in countries that operate under the rule of law.”

“After the February 2025 bar exam disaster, California should adopt the NextGen Uniform Bar Exam for July 2028 and restore confidence in the licensing process,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

Gaming law expert Rick Trachok, and lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Law weighs in on the practice of card clubs getting around the restriction of offering blackjack by using designated outside dealers.

“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.”

UC Berkeley transportation expert Ethan Elkind said high-speed rail has long struggled to win federal backing in a country that prioritizes highway spending. “It’s an area where it becomes unfortunate for a state like California that is generating a lot of tax revenue for the United States, but it’s transportation needs are not really reflected in the federal priorities,” Elkind said. 

“California is struggling with wildfire costs, for example, which are linked strongly to a warming climate,” said Ethan Elkind, a climate law expert at UC Berkeley. “I think that opens up a lot of legal avenues for states like California.”

“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.

Berkeley Law earns an A+ on The National Jurist’s International Law Honor Roll.

“After the court in December upheld the Texas legislature’s gerrymandering, intended to benefit Republicans, it did the “right” thing on Feb. 4 in dismissing the challenge to California’s gerrymandering which was to benefit Democrats,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But by allowing unchecked partisan gerrymandering, the court is encouraging ever more extreme efforts and undermining democracy.”

“The Trump administration has chosen a small handful of issues that it is interested in enforcing through civil rights, and it’s noisy about those and noisy about its disdain for everything else,” said Catherine Lhamon, who led OCR under the Obama and Biden administrations. “And that is unprecedented and dangerous and illegal.”

Dave Jones, Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) is included in the Washington Post’s Post Next 50 list. The list looks at the people who are actively reshaping how America thinks, works, connects and creates.

A conversation with Michele Statz, the inaugural Director of Judicial Wellbeing at the Berkeley Judicial Institute.

The reduction in billionaire wealth growth might be “worth somebody’s time to march against,” said Professor Brian Galle, “but for me, it’s something I would march in favor of.”

“At the moment, the most painful, prejudicial consequences are for trans people,” says Kathryn Abrams, a University of California, Berkeley law professor studying sex discrimination. But “the executive order absolutely has implications for heterosexual, cisgender women,” she says. “Sometimes, I think that’s their main target.”

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.”

Ethan Elkind, a climate law expert at UC Berkeley, said structuring the incentives as grants allows the state to set the terms automakers must meet to access the money, giving California leverage over manufacturers.

“The Chief Privacy Officer Program reflects that commitment, offering rigorous, practice-informed training for the peopleresponsible for privacy and AI governance at the highest levels of decision-making, in California and beyond,” said Eric Askins, assistant dean for innovation at Berkeley Law.

Historically, ICE made relatively few arrests at homes, worksites, and other public places. Instead, “the vast majority of arrests that ICE used to conduct were really transfers of custody from a state or local authority to the federal government,” said David Hausman, a UC Berkeley Law assistant professor and the faculty director of the Deportation Data Project. As Hausman recently explained to my colleague Christian Paz, however, that norm has changed — and radically — under President Donald Trump. ICE now carries out thousands of “at-large” arrests in public.

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

Brian Galle is not looking to ban billionaires. In fact, the tax law expert and key architect behind California’s controversial wealth tax proposal described himself as an “enthusiastic capitalist.” “I think capitalism is a great system that probably has, you know, enriched the lives of billions of people,” he told Fortune from his office in Berkeley, where he teaches courses on tax and nonprofit law. “But I’m not sure that our system is a functioning capitalist system right now.

“Someone with a pending charge who is not convicted is not usually called a ‘criminal’ in our criminal system,” said David Hausman, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law who directs the Deportation Data Project.

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.

University of California, Berkeley, School of Law is leading the way on the AI front. One year after launching the world’s first LL.M. Certificate in AI Law and Regulation, the school has expanded its curriculum with new courses in biotechnology, business and corporate strategy.

“The crackdown is bigger than what it would seem,” David Hausman, a University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor of law and codirector of the Deportation Data Project, a repository of federal immigration enforcement data, told USA TODAY. He pointed to large increases in arrests within the United States, which often get conflated with arrests at the border that have dwindled dramatically under Trump.

“What we find, which is at first a little puzzling, is actually the opposite — that deportations went up even more quickly than arrests,” said David Hausman, a co-director of the Deportation Data Project.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Christopher Kutz offer opposing perspectives on the suspension of a UC Berkeley lecturer over his pro-Palestinian advocacy. 

Colleen Chien, a professor of law at U.C. Berkeley School of Law, told Mashable that companies can be more careful when licensing their technology by creating a “vetted partner” program that places key restrictions on the licensee. This process could include requiring licensees to complete certification or training to ensure they’re using the technology safely and appropriately.

“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.

Ethan Elkind, a rail expert and director of the climate program at UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, said that a variety of political and logistical factors slowed attention to it: a focus on downtown transit; opposition to high-capacity transit in the San Fernando Valley; and geological challenges in the Sepulveda Pass. “It’s a lot of land. And the more land you have to go through, the more expensive it is, the more logistically challenging it is,” Elkind said.

“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.

In holding the startup to account for these tragedies, the families were testing a legal argument that hasn’t yet won in court. But the mere prospect of the families winning likely pushed Google to settle, according to Vincent Joralemon, the director of the Berkeley Law Life Sciences Law & Policy Center. Joralemon said a single wrongful death lawsuit can result in a $20 million to $100 million judgment because the damages are meant to punish the companies, not just pay the wronged plaintiffs. Joralemon said that level of legal risk extends to the entire AI industry.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor John Yoo weigh in on Presidential power over the economy in fight over Fed’s Lisa Cook.

“We see a lot of cheap talk from billionaires,” said UC Berkeley law professor Brian Galle, who helped write the proposal. “Some people do actually leave and change their behavior, but the vast bulk of wealthy people don’t, because it doesn’t make sense.”

Those prosecutors would “have a strong obligation to act,” given interest by their constituents here in the Bay Area, said Jonathan Simon, a law professor at UC Berkeley. Yet any such local effort would likely run headlong into a growing reality that “Trump and his underlings in the homeland security sector are just kind of openly suggesting the law doesn’t apply to them.”

UC Berkeley law professor Brian Galle, who is advising the campaign, argues the tax could help offset California’s budget deficit and rising health care costs, in part fueled by federal government cuts. “The bigger hit to California’s economy is if we can’t cover that sharp spike in health care costs. That’s what’s going to stop the next generation of startups.”

Should disputes over the images wind up in court, Vincent Joralemon, director of the Life Sciences Law & Policy Center and UC Berkeley’s law school, said he wouldn’t want to be charged with defending them. That’s because the victims of such images were likely to find sympathetic judges and jurors, he said.

“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.

“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.”

David Hausman, a UC Berkeley School of Law assistant professor and the faculty director of the Deportation Data Project, discusses how ICE is operating in a completely different way to how it has historically worked.

“Development funds intended to improve Honduras were instead funneled to an already wealthy family with no experience building hydroelectric dams and were ultimately used to finance violence and tear apart the social fabric,” said Professor Roxanna Altholz, an international human rights lawyer and one of the report’s lead investigators.