Press Highlights

Professor Amanda Tyler joins Advisory Opinions host Sarah Isgur to discuss Trump v Barbara.

“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.” 

Assistant Professor Emily Rong Zhang joins KALW’s State of the Bay to discuss a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that could shape whether states are allowed to count mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.

“A lot of people, when Trump first started talking about it, thought this is crazy,” said John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, who was a top lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. “But in the intervening years, a lot more serious people are taking it seriously.” Even as the legal debate has grown more robust, many legal experts, including Professor Yoo, remain confident that a majority of justices across the ideological spectrum will rule against Mr. Trump’s quest to redefine citizenship.

The Supreme Court case “could upend her life’s work,” said Catherine Lahmon, executive director of the Edley Center on Law and Democracy. “It has potentially devastating consequences for the country. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and she’s eyes wide open about what that means. And, to her credit, this is not just academic for her.”

“I think that this country has always had an ongoing debate about what our immigration policies should be and this issue, for better or worse, has often been connected to those broader debates,” said Amanda Tyler, a constitutional law scholar at Berkeley Law.

“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.

Judge Jeremy Fogel, executive director Berkeley Judicial Institute, discusses a new ethics advisory opinion which permits sitting federal judges to speak openly about threats against the judiciary and address “persecution.”

“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.”

“I don’t think it should have ever gotten to a jury trial,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and an expert on the 1st Amendment, which also protects the platforms. “All media tries to keep people on [their platform] and coming back.”

Maiya Zwerling, clinical supervisor at Berkeley Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic (PAC) joins KPFA’s Law & Disorder to discuss PAC’s report No Time To Wait: A Case for Releasing Elders from California’s Women’s Prisons.

Professor Amanda Tyler’s brief in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizen case, is cited in Boston Globe opinion piece.

“Calling it a constitution is entirely rhetorical,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of U.C. Berkeley’s law school, said, since, although you can call anything a constitution—a city charter, a corporate mission statement—the word “constitution” signifies to most people a popularly written and ratified document that limits what a government can do.

“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.”

“Under the First Amendment, the press decides how it wants to report the war. The government cannot control what the press says,” explained Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. Chemerinsky’s fear, he continued, is that the worse the war goes, “the more it [the administration] might escalate pressure on the media.”

Brian Galle, a UC Berkeley tax law professor and co-author of the billionaire tax, called Saez “one of the real geniuses of our time.” It’s not just that Saez has won a John Bates Clark Medal, the most prestigious economic laurel not named the Nobel Prize. Working with him, Galle said, “can sometimes feel like the tax-policy equivalent of a 10-day-contract guy trading passes with LeBron James.”

No Time to Wait, a new report by the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and the UC Berkeley Law Policy Advocacy Clinic, analyzes pathways for release, including commutations, compassionate release, medical release, resentencing, and parole. It recommends that the state utilize elderly parole and resentencing more expansively, allowing more aging people, particularly those sentenced during California’s tough-on-crime era, to be released.

UC Berkeley Law professor David Oppenheimer, author of “The Diversity Principle,” which recounts 200 years of policies promoting diversity in employment, education and politics, said Tuesday he thinks Stanford could make a legitimate argument that its training course is different from minority-admissions programs that the Supreme Court prohibited.

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.

Brian Galle, a UC Berkeley School of Law professor who teaches courses on taxation and nonprofit organizations, has overseen two projects designed to reign in the power of the ultrarich.

“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.

“I’m not going to change what I say, but I will try to make sure the assignments don’t invite students into making statements that could get them in trouble,” said Professor Christopher Kutz.

“It’s ironic that they’re doing this just at the time when people are most worried about gas prices,” said Dan Farber, faculty director of the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley’s law school.

“The genius of the Constitution’s design of separation of powers is that it is meant to require the involvement of two branches of the federal government for any major action,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. 

“What the Trump administration is doing in cutting off funds to universities is clearly illegal,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law School, who served as co-counsel on a case to restore some of the University of California system’s research funding, told me. The administration, he explained, hadn’t followed any of the procedures spelled out by federal law to revoke funds: “The response needs to be to go to court and challenge them.”

“(AI is) very related to how we win conflicts,” said Professor Chris Hoofnagle. “If these (military) decisions are not made correctly, we could kill innocent people with devices and in ways where the human is disconnected, so it’s a profound ethical issue confronting our generation.”

BART’s struggles amount to a “post-Covid keyboard economy story,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and an expert in transit systems. “The jobs disappeared from downtown in favor of people’s home offices and wherever they could set up a laptop,” he said.

“Our ability to address changes in the market immediately is a major reason why law firms want to hire our students and why students want to be here,” said Professor Frank Partnoy. “I don’t know of any other law school offering the combination of substance about economics and finance, process related to law firm partnerships and hiring, and practical advice for careers that we are.”

“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.”

David Oppenheimer discusses his new book “The Diversity Principle: The Story of a Transformative Idea.”

In a new book, UC Berkeley legal scholar David B. Oppenheimer unearths the surprising history of diversity in Western thought. While high-level critics are trying to bury the idea, he says, research shows that diversity is good for society.

“There is a very strong argument that the law is constitutional so long as it applies to all law enforcement,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School and an early champion of the original No Secret Police Act, known in Sacramento as SB 627.

“You had literally grants for millions of dollars being canceled in a single vague paragraph: ‘This no longer comports with administration priorities, thank you very much,’” said Claudia Polsky, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who has led a class-action lawsuit among University of California researchers that has restored, for now, at least a thousand grants worth about a billion dollars.

“Ultimately, the issues are about the right of parents to be informed as opposed to the ability of the state to protect the privacy rights of children,” UC Berkeley law Professor Erwin Chemerinsky said. “The Court, 6-3, comes down in favor of the former.”

Savala Nolan, executive director, Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at Berkeley Law joins Forum to discuss her new book of essays “Good Woman: A Reckoning.”

“It’s more common for public officials to say things about judges that go beyond respectful disagreement with a decision,” said former U.S. district judge Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute. “They tend to be more personal in nature,” added Fogel, who served in the Northern District of California. “I don’t think that the court system is perfect by any means… but I think the uptick in misconduct complaints, that is sort of an environmental result of people criticizing the courts more in the public sphere.”

Professor Brian Galle joins KALW’s State of the Bay to discuss a proposed one-time wealth tax on California’s billionaires.

“President Donald Trump’s disdain for the Constitution is evident in his launching a war in Iran without any semblance of congressional approval,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Congress must act quickly to protect its role in a Constitution that was meant to prevent such unilateral action by the president.”

UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said that both the SAVE Act and proposed ballot measure in California are not only unnecessary, but harmful to democracy. “Both are aimed at solving problems that don’t exist,” Chemerinsky said.

“You could imagine someone saying, ‘Well, he did his time in ’09 and I just went to some fancy dinners; it’s not my job as a civilian to punish him.’ But shame is the sanction we have,” Professor Christopher Kutz said.

Catherine Lhamon, the executive director of the UC Berkeley Edley Center on Law and Democracy, said the Brandeis Center and StandWithUs lawsuit appears to express a vote of “no confidence” in California’s recent legislative efforts to address antisemitism at schools.

“If you don’t have a system of checks to encourage or require employers to examine their procedures and to question their decisions when their decisions appear to be biased then you will have more and more discrimination and fewer and fewer opportunities for women, people of color, people with disabilities, people who are negatively stereotyped,” said Professor David Oppenheimer.

“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 Andrea Roth weighs in on Federal Rule of Evidence 707.

Vincent Joralemon, director of the Life Sciences Law and Policy Center at Berkeley Law weighs in on patent disputes in the sector of fitness tracker devices. 

“The tariffs decision is important in showing that a court that overwhelmingly has sided with Trump over the last year will, at least sometimes, be a check,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But the many different opinions, especially among the conservative justices, are also revealing of underlying disagreements that could matter greatly in future cases. Although it always is dangerous to generalize too much from one decision, the tariffs case shows a clear divide among the conservative justices in their willingness to curb presidential power.”  

University of California, Berkeley law professor John Yoo highlighted the fact that the tariffs ruling was joined by justices appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents. “The decision belies the attacks from the left that the Supreme Court – particularly its conservative majority – simply rubber-stamps the Trump administration’s policies,” said Yoo.

“It sends a message that the justices aren’t going to be a rubber stamp approving President Trump’s actions,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley law school.