Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

“This is a new way of doing business,” said Seth Galanter, an attorney who worked for OCR under the Obama and Biden administrations and is now a senior fellow at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at Berkeley Law. “There’s no nuance,” Galanter said. “There’s no inquiry into whether there’s a hostile environment. They say, ‘You have a policy, and the policy violated the law and yeah, you’re in trouble now.’ That is not something that prior administrations would have done.”

While the details of the interagency agreement are vague, director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy Catherine E. Lhamon said the shifts are sure to slow down civil rights claims. “An agreement to further slow down the work is unconscionable.” 

“Moving the work to a place that has no expertise in, has no history in doing the same work for anyone on any issue in any school is a problem in the best of times, and in these — which are very far from the best of times — demonstrate why,” said Catherine Lhamon, executive director of The Edley Center on Law & Democracy. “Giving the Department of Justice jurisdiction over all of these issues, will only further weaponize the rights and only protect a select few of us, rather than all of us under the law.”

“We’re experiencing now an unprecedented assault on the Constitution, on the First Amendment, and of freedom of speech,” said Dean Chemerinsky at the 2026 Berkeley Art, Law, and Finance Symposium. “The closest analog that I can think of would be in the early 1950s during the McCarthy era, but that was not led by the president of the United States.”

Catherine Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights under President Joe Biden, a Democrat, said the barrage of investigations amounted to “performance art” that grabbed attention but had little impact. After pushback from schools, she said, the Trump administration is backing off. “It stopped putting itself in a position to lose,” said Lhamon, who now leads the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the University of California, Berkeley.

In this episode of Equity Leadership Now!, Catherine E. Lhamon joins host Jabari Mahiri to discuss her role as the inaugural Executive Director of the Christopher Edley Center on Law and Democracy and pressing issues surrounding democracy in the United States.

Catherine Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s civil rights office under both Biden and Obama, said she found the Epstein correspondence stunning. “When I saw that text in the Epstein files, my jaw dropped,” said Lhamon, who now leads UC Berkeley Law’s Edley Center on Law and Democracy. “It is very surprising to me to see the crass and dismissive terminology, as reported, from the White House about survivors of discrimination … and the ugliness of the explicit planning and strategizing and which of our kids in school our federal government disdains.”

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.

“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.”