Press Highlights

“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.

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.