Press Highlights

“What’s important to remember is that criminalization is not a solution to homelessness,” UC Berkeley Law Assistant Dean of Clinical Education Laura Riley said. “It’s a way to hide homelessness from view of people who are housed.”

“The administration is constructing the visual spectacle to accompany its assertion of an ‘insurrection’ demanding a militarized response,” said Leti Volpp, a professor of immigration law at the University of California at Berkeley. “The administration wants the American public to take away from these videos the sense that immigrants are completely dehumanized ‘bad people’ who need to be removed from this country; their continued presence threatens law and order.”

Catherine Crump, technology law professor at UC Berkeley School of Law gives insight on location data tech used to track dissidents. 

“The discount is nice and it’s a positive development, but it doesn’t matter if they won’t write you the insurance,” says Dave Jones, former insurance commissioner of California and now director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley Law.

“No president in history has asserted the ability to control federal spending as Trump has done,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “The federal courts must stop this if we are to remain a democracy under the Constitution.”

“In fighting to uphold the law, we also must not lose sight that we are fighting for the human beings who are protected by it,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“This view of women and women’s roles is precisely what feminists reacted against in the mid-19th century, and then again in the 1960s and 1970s,” said Professor Khiara M. Bridges.

New research by Professor Ofer Eldar and Mark Ørberg unpacks the economic rationales behind nonprofit business ownership, challenge the idea that it’s all about purpose, & highlight the overlooked risks of nonprofit control.

Elena Chachko, an assistant professor of law at Berkeley Law School, says it’s the president’s pushing of boundaries — and the legal challenges that follow — that will ultimately define how emergency powers can be used.
“This is what happens when you take an instrument that has been very useful for many administrations, for many years, and now you overextend it,” she says. “You use it to do novel things with questionable legal basis, and what you do is invite pushback and invite criticism and invite limitations.”

“The use of the military to quell protests is something associated with dictators in foreign countries, and as of Saturday night, with a president of the United States.,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

Professor Katerina Linos weighs in on potential legal challenges to President Trump’s travel ban affecting 12 countries.

“No modern presidential administration has undertaken such an effort to staff the entire government with political loyalists,” write Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Catherine Fisk. “It is plainly inconsistent with good government, with federal law and with the Constitution.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky speaks with Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd about Trump’s new travel ban and student visa restrictions.

What is due process? Dean Chemerinsky helps answer that question.

“Big Law’s quick court wins don’t erase Trump’s damage to the profession, underscoring that law firms must fight.” – Opinion by UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, UC Law SF Dean David Faigman, and retired Judge Nancy Gertner of Harvard Law.

Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment weighs in as California considers a major overhaul of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

Professor Amanda Tyler, constitutional law expert and expert on habeas corpus, says today’s fight over government power to detain people without due process could foreshadow a historic constitutional crisis.

“After weeks of wrangling, the House passed the bill last week by the thinnest of margins. The bill’s fate, though, ultimately depends on an obscure Senate rule: the Byrd rule,” writes Professor Jonathan Gould.

“Imagine Elizabeth Holmes being pardoned and then immediately headlining the world’s biggest biotech summit. Would never happen,” said UC Berkeley Law lecturer Hermine Wong.

UC Berkeley School of Law professor Ofer Eldar joins the Activist Investing Today podcast to discuss the evolution of poison pills. 

Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute discusses the growing call for judges to control their security force.

“A crucial tool for police reform will be lost.,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “An increase in police violation of rights and police violence, especially against individuals of color, seems inevitable.”

“What the Trump administration is doing is a direct assault on the independence of universities and on academic freedom,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

Can Trump suspend habeas corpus? Professor Amanda Tyler weighs in.

“Members of the founding generation referred to habeas as ‘essential to freedom,’” says Amanda Tyler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. As such, she adds, they expected habeas to be suspended “only in the most dramatic of circumstances.”

A new report from UC Berkeley Law looks at how the legal landscape has changed in the past year. KQED housing affordability reporter Vanessa Rancaño spoke with Laura Riley, Assistant Dean of Clinical Education at Berkeley Law, about what she and her students found.

Expedited removal was used in ~7% of ICE arrests in the first month of the new admin, slightly up from 2024, per data from UC Berkeley Law Assistant Professor David Hausman and the Data Deportation Project.

“It’s an attempt to intimidate potential critics,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law.

“How Texas deals with this question is going to be very critical on how people see Texas, moving forward, and how people see Delaware, moving forward, and ultimately how they see corporations,” said Professor Stavros Gadinis. “I don’t think that Texas courts would necessarily be willing to be aligned with Delaware.”

Amanda Tyler, a constitutional law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, called habeas corpus “one of the single most foundational aspects of American law and the American constitution.”

“The federal courts are a crucial protector of the guardrails of our democracy. Now is not the time to greatly weaken their power to enforce the Constitution,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“At a time when President Trump is claiming unprecedented executive powers, the Supreme Court may be poised to eliminate a significant check on presidential authority,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. 

“Insurance is the climate crisis canary in the coal mine, and the canary is dying,” said Dave Jones, director of the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, Center for Law, Energy and the Environment.

“It was thought to be a wacky idea that only political philosophers would buy. They’ve finally got a president who agrees,” said Professor John Yoo.

“All of this adds to a sense of the judiciary being under attack,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former judge in California who now runs the Berkeley Judicial Institute. “Whether or not it’s going to be successful, it’s seen as part of a broader attempt to weaken or delegitimize the judiciary.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky weighs in on a little-noticed Executive Order aimed at ending “disparate impact” liability.

“The importance of due process of law has been recognized for centuries. What is different now is an administration that wants to do what it chooses without meeting the requirements for due process and without any checks upon its powers,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinksy. “That is a dictatorship, not a constitutional democracy.”

The opposing positions of the national and state government create unpredictability for the companies that make vehicles. “That creates uncertainty for industry and could help ensure that we’re burning more fossil fuel and more gas guzzlers can be produced in the meantime,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

Dave Jones, director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley Law discusses how climate risk is no longer a “nice to have”, especially as climate disclosure requirements are becoming a regulatory obligation globally and delves into the role of insurance in managing climate risk, the importance of nature-based solutions, and the need for transparency and proactive measures in corporate practices.

“The current draft of the GENIUS Act elevates centralized entities in overseeing stable coins,” writes UC Berkeley Law lecturer Hermine Wong. “Democrats should take the right stand against it.”

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, discusses the new report he co-authored  looking at the cost savings of all-electric construction.

“Lawyers, this is our time,” write UC Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center executive director David A. Carrillo and senior research fellow Brandon V. Stracener. 

Chesa Boudin, executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at the UC Berkeley Law and Kenneth E. Hartman, a formerly incarcerated lifer weigh in on Trump’s Department of Justice’s decision to terminate all funds for an effort to stop prison rape by defunding the national Prison Rape Elimination Act Resource Center.

Is the arrest of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan the start of Trump’s open war on judges? Berkeley Judicial Institute’s Judge Jeremy Fogel joined host Mary Harris on Slate’s “What Next” podcast to discuss.

Donald Trump’s abuse of emergency powers to impose antidemocratic measures—from sweeping tariffs and chaotic mass deportations to a so-called “national energy emergency”–represents a “quantum leap” from previous presidents, says UC Berkeley legal scholar Daniel Farber. “Trump is going further than his predecessors in really trying to weaponize the idea of emergency powers.”

The waiver was created to address California’s unique circumstances of not only pioneering and leading the country in the creation of air-quality and air-emissions control policy, but also of having very specific air-pollution challenges relating to vehicles, geography and industry, said Ted Lamm, associate director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s a bedrock part of the Clean Air Act.”

“If the president can violate any law, and even ignore court orders, then we are no longer a constitutional democracy,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinksy. “The word for that is a dictatorship, and it is chilling to realize how close we are to that.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky weighs in on cases before SCOTUS challenging injunctions against executive orders to end birthright citizenship.

“The difference between the first and second Trump administration’s legal strategy is the 2025 version’s contempt for due process and the rule of law,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“Even with the right regulations in place, insurers aren’t known for embracing change,” said Dave Jones, California’s former Department of Insurance head who now runs the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley Law. “It’s a very conservative industry. You need to show them that an insurer is able to (make money doing this) before others will follow suit.”