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Honored at the annual public interest and pro bono graduation ceremony, the recipients exemplify Berkeley Law’s far-reaching work to help disadvantaged people and communities.

The new Berkeley Law alums land top positions at law firms, judicial clerkships, public defender offices, nonprofits, government agencies, and military units. 

“Make no mistake, deposits in the United States are insured whether the law says so or not,” writes Professor Krishnamurthy. “It is time to recognize this reality and adopt explicit and progressive insurance for large deposits.”

Professor John Yoo with Robert Delahunty, a Washington fellow of the Claremont Center for the American Way of Life, says ethics war on the Supreme Court is a warning for 2024.

Cirelli is the youngest member of the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake’s five-person Constitutional Review Committee and its only law student.

“What makes the Fifth Circuit so stunning is not only that it’s dominated by Republican appointees but how conservative they are,” Dean Chemerinsky said.

Berkeley Law Professor Kristen Holmquist discusses how lawyers and law schools are grappling with cultural competency.

Professor of Law Khiara M. Bridges joins hosts Lori Adelman and Leila Durabi for a conversation about reproductive rights.

She’ll spend the fall semester in Germany working on a project about failure of international human rights law to adequately address the treatment of soldiers by their states.

“There are still some open questions about the extent to which states can issue rules like this,” said Tejas Narechania, faculty director at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. “I think the decision here maybe points toward the states being able to do more of that. I think that’ll be true in the tech space, in particular.”

Law enforcement prosecutions are inherently difficult, UC Berkeley law Professor Jonathan Simon allowed. State law enables police to use deadly force when they reasonably believe they are threatened; juries bring a set of presumptions into the courtroom and historically they have been swayed by testimony of police officers. Considering all these hurdles, “it’s inevitably rare that officers are charged for using force in the course of their jobs,” Simon said, let alone convicted.

“The decision is not remarkable in that it follows decades of precedent,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “Its significance is that it did not impose significant new restrictions on states’ regulatory power. But given how readily the Roberts court has abandoned precedents and ruled in favor of business and against regulation, it is notable and welcome.”

Separated from her sister in Mexico, César is on Hispanic Executive’s 30 Under 30 list for her wide-ranging work to benefit immigrant, Latinx, and BIPOC communities.

State law mandates that California switch to clean energy and achieve carbon neutrality by 2045. Offshore wind could play an important role, said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, because the power it generates is somewhat more constant than land-based wind or solar.

“If charges are filed, defense counsel will ask for discovery of all evidence known to the D.A. at the time that she expressed her initial opinion, on the basis that the evidence is reasonably likely to be exculpatory,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge and now executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute at UC Berkeley Law School

“It is the responsibility of those who know her and that she respects to ask her to do a final act of great public service for California and the country: resign,” writes Dean Chemerinsky.

The community action group Clean Cape Fear in North Carolina, US, has joined forces with the University of California Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic to formally request that the United Nations investigate multiple alleged human rights violations related to chemical manufacturer Chemours’ release of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from its Fayetteville plant along the lower Cape Fear river.

A Berkeley Law symposium highlights barriers to officer accountability and victims’ access to the courts, including police department culture and dubious causes of death given by medical examiners.

From high-level national and state appointments to major honors demonstrating far-reaching legal expertise, our educators were recognized for their outstanding leadership, research, and analysis.

The erosion of the court’s public esteem is not due entirely to the tenor of its recent decisions, UC Berkeley law professor Jeremy Fogel, a former federal and California state judge and currently executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, told the committee. Among other important factors, Fogel mentioned “a persistently hyperpartisan political environment … and the pervasiveness of social media as a source of misinformation and disinformation about the law, the judicial process and the judges and justices to whom that process is entrusted.”

“Millions of Americans live one purchase away from emptying their bank account, and they pay a steep price for oversights in account management,” writes Berkeley Law Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy. “Better regulation can stop banks from preying on consumer inattention so that overdrafts and NSF can truly function as a means of emergency credit, at least until better options emerge.”

Former federal judge Jeremy Fogel, now executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute at UC-Berkeley Law School, said in prepared remarks it was “awkward” for him to testify because he admires Roberts and understands the complications of adopting a code of ethics for the justices.

Coverage of the hearing on Supreme Court Ethics in which The Honorable Jeremy Fogel, Berkeley Judicial Institute Executive Director participated.

Joshua Spivak, senior research fellow at Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center discusses third parties.

Jeremy Fogel, a former federal district judge and the executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute at the University of California, Berkeley Law School, said other federal judges on the lower courts would benefit alongside the public from the Supreme Court’s taking a more active stance on ethics.

“Part of this story is about how the system they created was vulnerable and all this information was available to someone else.”said Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in criminal procedure and privacy. 

The bankruptcy scholar “goes above and beyond to ensure his students feel supported in their academic pursuits,” 2L Tara Kay says.

“There should be no First Amendment right to use speech to cause a reasonable person to fear for their safety,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “Based on oral arguments in the Supreme Court on April 19 in Counterman v. Colorado, however, it appears that the justices are likely to make it much harder to prove that speech is a threat.”

“I think the court is slower this year, but it has been pretty slow in recent years, too,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. “It does mean that there again will be a flurry of blockbuster decisions in June,” he added.

If the UN human rights commission chooses to investigate, a special rapporteur would fact-check the allegations in the communication, then issue “pointed” allegation letters to regulators, Chemours and other culpable parties detailing problems and posing questions, said Claudia Polsky, director of UC Berkley Law Clinic.

Part of the Pro Bono Program, the Berkeley Law Alternative Service Trips offer a school-funded opportunity to offer legal help to people in need.

“The Special Rapporteur can’t compel any action,” said Claudia Polsky, director of UC Berkeley’s Environmental Law Clinic. “But if he decides to investigate the allegations and recommends the companies or agencies take any of the requested actions, the public attention often spurs alleged offenders to respond publicly.”

“They’re the most aggressive (regulations) of their kind,” said UC Berkeley environmental law Professor Ethan Elkind. “There are previous (federal) regulations on locomotive emissions, but these will be the first to really push for zero-emission locomotives.”

Dean Chemerinsky discusses a few of the United State Supreme Court’s most high profile cases to be decided this year.

“The key is to separate the social insurance from the employer’s control and from employment entirely, because that gives employers that are unwilling to comply with the law a lot of leverage over their employees,” said Catherine Albiston,  professor of law and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The ultimate liberty is the right to be left alone, and Dobbs established a clear mandate for state courts to define that right under their state constitutions,” write David Carrillo and Brandon V. Stracener of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law. “This is an opportunity for states to abandon their flawed lockstep doctrines, reassert themselves as the primary guarantors of individual liberty, and restore the state–federal balance of power in this area of the law.”

In a piece by Edward Wasserman, professor and former dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, Dean Chemerinsky said “The law is clear that retaliation against a person—that includes a corporation—for its speech violates the First Amendment. Gov. DeSantis and the Florida legislature have done exactly that, and said that is what they were doing, in its reprisal against Disney.”

Stephanie Campos-Bui, an assistant clinical professor of law at Berkeley Law and Policy Advocacy Clinic, said California law previously authorized the criminal legal system to charge people with over 90 different fees.

Presented by Military Veterans at Berkeley Law, the event raised awareness of concerning issues and bolstered connections between veteran students and alumni and their supporters.

“Litigants should not be able to handpick a judge who then can issue a nationwide injunction throwing the entire country into chaos,” writes Dean Chemerinsky.

The court’s decision “is not obviously wrong,” said Dan Farber, an environmental law professor at UC Berkeley, who disagreed with the decision. “But I don’t think it’s crystal clear.”

“Many students come to Berkeley Law with the clear intention of positively impacting communities — whether it be here in the East Bay or globally,” said Laura Riley, director of Berkeley Law’s Clinical Program. “Clinics provide an opportunity to do that while growing advocacy skills that students take with them as they become attorneys.” 

“The approach of finals made us realize that we had to say something,” said professor Chris Hoofnagle. “We want to make sure we have clear guidelines so that students don’t inadvertently attract an honor code violation.”

David Nahmias, staff attorney with UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice discusses student debt forgiveness.

From co-leading our business law journal and Catholic affinity group to helping renters secure key housing rights, Whitthorne has made the most of his Berkeley Law experience.

Mark Cohen, the Asia IP Project Director at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, told the Subcommittee that “China’s rise did not occur overnight. Rather, we have made profound mistakes in not identifying China’s increasing innovative capacity and we need to proceed now without the bureaucratic myopia, antique organizational structures and indifference to data that have haunted prior administrations.”

“Ideally, the court, on its own, would adopt an ethics code for its members, writes Dean Chemerinsky and Dennis Aftergut. “The absence of ethical rules is an unnecessary self-inflicted wound. Absent the court reforming itself, Congress must act and impose one on the justices. One would hope that the court would not be so foolish as to declare unconstitutional a law that is meant to regulate it.”

Prasad Krishnamurthy, a professor at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, favors raising the $250,000 cap to an unspecified amount. Recent decisions by regulators to cushion uninsured depositors from losses effectively render the $250,000 limit moot anyway, he argued.

Host Brittany Luse is joined by UC Berkeley Law professor Khiara M. Bridges to connect the dots between the recent legal battles over the abortion pill mifepristone and our constitutional right to privacy.

“This is an issue for the FDA – not the courts – to decide,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “One would hope that even the conservative Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade would recognize this and want to keep the federal judiciary out of the abortion issue. But given the anti-abortion views of a majority of justices, there is every reason to be very worried.”

“We had accepted that federal law would preempt state law, that it would be preposterous that one federal judge in one district in Texas—or in any other state—would be able to affect the availability of a drug that had had FDA approval for 20 years,” says Khiara M. Bridges, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now the things that we thought we knew about the relationship between federal law and state law, and the FDA’s ability to regulate, have been called into question.”

The Daily Californian sat down with Chemerinsky for a conversation about his career as a scholar and advocate, as well as why free speech — specifically on college campuses — matters.

“It sort of puts the fire under all courts in the country to resolve the conflict as soon as possible,” said Professor Khiara M. Bridges.

Thomas von Danwitz gives Berkeley Law’s annual Irving G. Tragen Lecture on Comparative Law, takes part in a panel on data privacy, and visits our “Borderlines” podcast.

“The Supreme Court has its lowest approval ratings in history,” writes Dean Chemerinksy and Dennis Aftergut. “Now, as much as ever, it is crucial that the justices make clear that they are not partisan hacks who just follow the Republican platform, but instead are committed jurists who follow the law. The recent decisions concerning mifepristone will give them just that opportunity.”

Expert leaders dedicated to top-rate client representation and student training help the clinic become a national leader in serving people facing capital punishment.

“The internet and social media provide instantaneous access to infinite information,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “My hope is that the Supreme Court will not step in to this enormously complicated landscape.”

“Judges like to exercise control and Merchan is undoubtedly upset at Trump blatantly disobeying him,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But the better course in this situation is to do nothing and let Trump speak.”

“I am thrilled at the gift from Tom Clark to create a chair in constitutional law,” Dean Chemerinsky said in a statement. “This is obviously such a core area of our curriculum and scholarship; it is law that affects everyone in the most important and intimate aspects of our lives.”

Dean Chemerinsky said the law “is clearly established that when the press lawfully obtains something, they’re allowed to truthfully report it,” and Camacho obviously obtained the images lawfully here.

The executive director of Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center leads the agency that studies problem areas in state law and proposes reforms, over 90% of which become law.

“Auto companies don’t want EV batteries associated with more destruction than they already have been,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. “There has already been a lot of negative publicity around the mining for these metals: human rights abuses, child labor, deaths from mines collapsing. You can imagine the risk with the deep sea. If ecological damage of these sensitive undersea areas comes to light after mining begins, they don’t want to be a part of it.”

“Few thought the failure of a midsize regional bank posed a risk to the entire U.S. economy until last month, and it would be reasonable to expect that regulators in the future may lean on the systemic-risk exception in the law to once again justify bailouts,” said Berkeley Law professor Prasad Krishnamurthy.

Dean Erwin Chemerinksy writes about two cases to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the First Amendment and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 

Berkeley Law Professor Daniel Farber, discusses the Trump indictment.

Bragg “has fired a strong opening shot,” said Daniel Farber, a professor at the UC Berkeley Law School who studies presidential power. “But it’s only the beginning of the battle.”

“The prosecutor’s statement of facts tells a powerful story about a conspiracy to falsify business records for political gain,” said Daniel Farber, a UC Berkeley law professor. “But serious political misconduct doesn’t necessarily equate to a criminal offense, let alone a felony. The prosecutor’s challenge will be to prove fraudulent intent … and to connect this conduct to a separate crime.”

The legacy donation from Tom Clark ’72 will create the Thomas David and Judith Swope Clark Chair in Constitutional Law.

Host Bakari Sellers is joined by Amanda Tyler, author and professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, to discuss Donald Trump’s unprecedented legal troubles, co-authoring Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s final book, Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue, and life lessons learned during the final months of Ginsburg’s life.

“With coordinated global reform, we can fight climate change while mining as sustainably as possible,” writes Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. “We simply do not have an alternative if we are serious about tackling the climate crisis in an equitable and humane way.”

“The indictment of a former president of the United States is unprecedented,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But Donald Trump is unprecedented. There is much to be worried about in setting a precedent for the criminal prosecution of a former president. But it would be much worse to conclude that anyone, including the president, is above the law.”

Perry assesses the Respect for Marriage Act, and how his family’s experience with the marriage equality issue fueled his interest in Berkeley Law and career aspirations.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law discusses autonomous vehicles.

“I know some disagree and claim a right to shout down speakers, writes Dean Chemerinsky. “But the only way my speech can be free tomorrow is to support protection for speech that I dislike today. I also am hopeful that there is a benefit in hearing views different from our own, though it can be unsettling and even painful.”

UC Berkley School of Law’s Dean Erwin Chemerinsky joins Morning Joe to discuss a recent protest at Stanford University when Trump-appointed judge Kyle Duncan spoke at the school.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law discusses plans for more solar in California’s San Joaquin Valley and the key barrier to building in the region.

Erik Stallman, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that Judge Gregory Katsas seemed to want to bifurcate the standards into different groups: Incorporated standards that impose a clear legal duty are more likely to be fair use, while those that are just explanatory may fall on the side of stronger copyright protection.

Drawing on their primary jobs as lawyers, advocates, and policymakers, our part-time teachers often become a beloved addition to the student experience. 

“No question there are a lot of minimum labor law standards in California, and I understand why employers find them onerous to comply with, not to mention expensive,” said UC Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a group of California labor and employment law professors opposed to Prop. 22. She added that she’s “disappointed” by the appeals court decision.

“The ruling means pregnant people no longer have to wait until “their life is literally on the line” to legally qualify for an abortion,” said Khiara M. Bridges, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “But it’s a narrow win because people trying to avoid a potentially life-threatening pregnancy make up a small proportion of those seeking abortions.”

“Banks and regulators will make mistakes, and banks should be allowed to fail, writes Prasad Krishnamurthy, professor at Berkeley Law.” “We need a system in which shareholders and debtholders bear the cost of failure, depositors are made whole and don’t panic, and banks and depositors pay for the insurance they receive at rates that are proportional to their risk.” 

Professor of Law Khiara M. Bridges joins host Lindsay Langholz for a conversation about forced birth in America and what it means for pregnant people, families, and the law when forced birth becomes a banality.

As Berkeley Law Professor Chris Hoofnagle summed up the task for his class: Try to “beat it.”

Professor of Law Catherine Fisk discusses California’s Prop. 22 and Assembly Bill No. 5.

“For decades, conservatives have preached judicial restraint and deference to the political process, write Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Catherine Fisk of Berkeley Law. “But that doesn’t seem to apply when they don’t like government regulation of business. They will surely use the 9th Circuit’s new decision and its fallacious reasoning to challenge a myriad of essential regulations needed to protect workers and consumers.”

Talking to Berkeley Law students at a recent Leadership Lunch Series event, the Gibson Dunn associate and former Navy officer describes her gratifying niche practice.

“L.A. and other local governments should be required to loosen development and zoning restrictions near rail stops, eliminating nitpicky requirements and endless hearings,” writes Ethan N. Elkind, director of the climate program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. “With the region experiencing a major housing shortfall and sky-high prices that have pushed lower-income residents to other regions and states or, in too many cases, the streets, allowing more dense, accessible housing is a humanitarian need as much as a transit one.”

Dean Chemerinsky discusses the continued conservative attacks on abortion rights.

David Carrillo and David A. Kaiser of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law write, “Supporters of increased affordable housing think a recently proposed initiative constitutional amendment will generate increased state power to impose building mandates on local governments. That’s unlikely to happen, because a new constitutional right to adequate housing has dim prospects in the courts.” 

In just its second year, Clean Energy Leaders in Law brings together students with diverse interests in energy and environmental law and policy. 

2L Berkeley Law student Drake Goodson is named one of National Jurist Magazine’s Law Students of the Year.

Host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law’s Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Nazune Menka, lecturer at Berkeley Law and a supervising attorney for the campus’s Environmental Law Clinic. They talk about how to bring a decolonial lens to education, and about the joys and challenges of being a trailblazer who is pushing against the inherited wisdom and mythology surrounding UC Berkeley.

Catherine Fisk, University of California, Berkeley Law professor, and Christina Chung, UC Berkeley Center for Law and Work executive director, argue that the US Supreme Court “simply misunderstood California law on PAGA standing; California law is clear that a plaintiff may litigate a PAGA action as a representative of the state for the labor law violations suffered by others regardless of whether the plaintiff must arbitrate her own claim.”

U.S. District Court Judges Sarala Nagala ’08 and Adrienne Nelson describe the inner workings of their judicial chambers and what they look for in prospective clerks. 

Berkeley Law professor, Catherine Fisk comments on the decision of the California Court of appeals to uphold Prop. 22.

“This month, the leaders of Los Angeles have the opportunity to join other jurisdictions that have reformed or eliminated the deeply troubling cash bail system,” Dean Chemerinsky and co-authors Miriam Arony Krinsky and Anthony Kline write. ” If they don’t, the courts should act to address a flawed and disturbing bail system that simply keeps those without resources in jail without any public safety benefit.”

Several Berkeley Law professors weigh in on the Court’s role and the potential implications of some of its recent decisions.

“One-ninth of the country’s population is in California, so I understand why (antiabortion activists) would want to bring the fight here,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. “But given the law in this state, and given the politics of the state, it’s hard to imagine them making much inroads here. I don’t think anyone really regards California as a battleground state with regards to abortion rights.”

Host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law’s Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews professor Khiara M. Bridges, a powerful public intellectual who speaks and writes about race, class, reproductive justice and the intersection of the three.

Ethan Elkind, who watches California transportation issues as director of the climate change program at UC Berkeley’s law school, said the mounting problems cloud the project’s future. “It is in jeopardy,” Elkind said. “It is dicey. There is no path forward for the full Los Angeles to San Francisco system. It is important that they get something done.”

“The agreement of the North Carolina Supreme Court to rehear the case doesn’t change the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. “But if the North Carolina Supreme Court were to overrule the earlier decision, and so that the earlier decision no longer stands, then the Supreme Court could say this controversy is moot and wouldn’t have jurisdiction.” 

Dean Chemerinsky said he believes there is a strong legal argument that assault weapons, as defined by California, are particularly dangerous and subject to regulation, and he hopes the higher courts will see it that way too.

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment discusses some of the issues for EV infrastructure and possible solutions.

Overcoming incarceration, homelessness, and hunger, Hensley has made the most of a California State University program that helps people reintegrate into the education system.

The International Human Rights Law Clinic’s 2020 Living with Impunity report is cited in the article. 

David Nahmias, a staff attorney with the UC Berkeley Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice, told Insider following the arguments that he was “pleased to see that standing figured prominently in the oral arguments.”

“It’s a serious complaint, but whether the suit is viable depends on whether TikTok is intercepting the communications,” Orin Kerr, a well-known law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Forbes. “It’s not a wiretap violation to have the capacity to intercept.”

The final round of the McBaine Honors Moot Court Competition — a jewel in an increasingly loaded crown of advocacy competitions — is March 20. 

“We’ve worked on a number of issues particularly relating to student loans,” said David Nahmias, staff attorney at Berkeley Law’s Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice. “Specifically we’ve filed an amicus brief in the Biden v. Nebraska case, that is challenging President Biden’s plan to cancel student debt for 40 million Americans.”. 

No matter what the U.S. Supreme Court does in the cases involving the Biden administration’s student loan relief plan, there is sure to be a major effect on many people’s lives and on the law, writes Dean Chemerinsky.

David Carrillo and David A. Kaiser of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law write, “if the U.S. Supreme Court abrogates Obergefell, as it did Roe, then the now-dormant Proposition 8 text in the California constitution will once again ban same-sex marriage in California.”

Berkeley Law Professor Jonathan Glater discusses Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan and the Supreme Court.

Professor Chris Hoofnagle discusses the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT.

David Nahmias, a staff attorney with the Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice discusses the case before the U.S. Supreme Court taking on Biden administrations student loan forgiveness program. 

She aims to reduce gun violence and mass incarceration while rooting out racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities within the county’s criminal legal system.

David Nahmias, a staff attorney with the UC Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice discusses the Supreme Court cases challenging Biden’s student-debt-relief plan. 

Lecturer Mallika Kaur writes, survivors of sexual assault face tremendous power imbalances in the legal system. A new California law helps rebalance the scales.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law discusses new efforts by the state to decarbonize its trucking industry.

“I don’t want my critique of class-based affirmative action to be understood as a critique of poor people,” Khiara M. Bridges, a law professor at UC Berkeley School of Law tells Teen Vogue. “That being said, I do not like the narrative of class-based affirmative action, where it tells a story that race or racial problems are over… and that we are living in a world where race doesn’t matter, only class does.”

As Ukrainian law enforcement officials and NGOs prepare for war crimes trials, their efforts to collect evidence are guided by digital-age legal standards developed at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center.

Professor Jonathan Glater writes about the pair of cases challenging the Biden administration’s student-debt relief program.

“This is California offering up our experience and innovation to try and drive innovation elsewhere,” says Michael Kiparsky, founding director of CLEE’s Wheeler Water Institute. 

In potential capital cases, local prosecutors often follow the requests of a victim’s family when it suits their purposes, said Elisabeth Semel, a UC Berkeley law professor and co-director of the school’s Death Penalty Clinic.

Holding its annual gala Feb. 24, the Dale Minami ’71 Public Interest Fellowship connects API alumni, honors deserving graduates, provides financial support to deserving lawyers, and more.

“The issue about targeted recommendations that promote access to dangerous things, whether it’s illegal drugs or child sexual abuse material or things about eating disorders — all of those things about algorithms — that’s actually at stake right now before the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Pamela Samuelson, a UC Berkeley law professor and co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.

“If the state would create a program that was to benefit Black students, that would be a preference based on race and would clearly violate the state Constitution,” Chemerinsky said. “However much I agree it’s desirable, it would surely get struck down by the courts, and you’re losing time to come up with ways to benefit that group that does have a chance of succeeding.”

The Asian American Law Journal, in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Fred Korematsu’s coram nobis case, hosted its annual symposium, entitled “Let’s Get Going!: Lessons from the Young Lawyers Who Overturned Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Yasui” at Berkeley Law. The symposium featured a panel with Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law discussing the continued impact the coram nobis cases have today.

Ethan Elkind, director of Berkeley Law’s  Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law discusses lawsuits surrounding self-driving mode on cars and the recent Tesla recall.

Berkeley Law Professor Holly Doremus discusses the State of Alaska’s lawsuit to reverse the National Marine Fisheries Service’s designation of critical habitat for threatened ringed and bearded seals.

Chemerinsky believes the government will be able to continue to require licenses for weapons and prohibit those convicted of felonies from having them, though even that is facing legal challenges. We may also be able to keep guns out of “sensitive places,” such as airports, schools and courthouses.

A recent conference brought together experts to discuss whether regulations are needed and what they might look like.

John Yoo, the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, and Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute discusses the many legal issues such as civil liberties, censorship, and freedom that have been exposed by the pandemic and management of the pandemic.

“The forum-shopping — filing in federal court in Amarillo where this is the only judge — is really outrageous,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean at UC Berkeley and a supporter of abortion rights.

“Other potential complicating factors include the fact that the episodes investigators presumably want to question Pence about — such as Trump’s efforts to influence the counting of the votes — don’t concern conventional presidential duties typically thought to be shielded by executive privilege,” said Daniel Farber, a presidential powers expert and UC Berkeley Law professor.

Antonio Ingram II ’14, Allina Amuchie ’13, Tyler Garvey ’14, and Shanita Farris ’16 credit the student group for pivotal support, networking, and community.

The Asian American Law Journal at Berkeley Law event welcomed prominent attorneys who helped gain a measure of justice for Japanese Americans sent to internment camps during World War II.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Dennis Aftergut, former federal prosecutor and currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy, write “The failure of the framers to recognize the problem of domestic violence or the related danger of allowing abusers access to guns should not be permitted to prevent public protection from gun violence today. Women will needlessly die because of the Fifth Circuit’s misguided decision.”

Library staff are moving books, periodicals, and other materials that cover America’s Indigenous people to their own place on the shelves. 

Berkeley Law Professor Tejas Narechania discusses a study he co-authored which found that judges in the Western District of Texas, Eastern District of Texas and the District of Delaware have higher appeals and reversal rates across the board when their dockets are crowded with patent cases.

Dean of Berkeley Law Erwin Chemerinsky makes the case for diversity statements, while NYU’s Jonathan Haidt argues against them.

“Why must we wait for the next death of another unarmed Black man to galvanize the public?” writes Dean Chermerinsky. “The problems are well-documented and many solutions are apparent. If the courts and the legislatures continue to do nothing, nothing will change.”

Dean Chemerinsky writes about the question of when state governments have standing to sue the United States.

“Slang amongst Black people is a love language and I am frustrated when that slang becomes appropriated and used by others and the meaning morphs,” said Khiara M. Bridges, author and professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. “There’s something really sinister about this term not only being taken from us but also deployed against us. It’s a double violation.”

Mark Cohen, senior fellow and director of the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, says while the measure is warranted in some cases, it could undermine US standing in global trade rules and lead to retaliation against US companies from other governments.

“It’s clear that Biden is going to have a lasting influence on the 9th Circuit by virtue of who he has picked. He certainly has enhanced the diversity,” said UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

Dean Chemerinsky discusses the history of policing powers and his book Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights.

Violent videos should be viewed with care, says Alexa Koenig, a faculty expert on psychological trauma and resiliency at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center.

UC Berkeley law professor Robert Bartlett said Musk’s way of disseminating corporate news is so far out of the norm that it’s hard to see his tweets as not being very intentional.

Mark Cohen, senior fellow and director of the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology writes about the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed ban of non-compete agreements in America and argues non-compete agreements are critical in protecting US trade secrets.

They’re on board at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, Berkeley Center for Law and Business, Human Rights Center, and Center for Law and Work.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law discusses the hope and limitations of green aviation technology and how we can reduce our carbon footprint when we fly.

“Some students have come to do their LL.M. here because their country is in an earlier phase of developing their technology-related laws and find it helpful to see how the U.S. has approached similar issues,” says Wayne Stacy, executive director at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law and Technology in California. “Other students come from countries where the body of technology law has gone in a different direction than the U.S. and they appreciate learning about the contrast.”

David Nahmias, a staff attorney with the UC Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice discusses the case to block Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.

The renowned litigator and former U.S. Attorney enlists a who’s-who of senators, congresspeople, journalists, scholars, and celebrities in “Talking Feds.”

Michael Kiparsky, water program director at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law discusses groundwater recharge projects.

“Professor Bradt is ideally suited for this role,” Dean Chemerinsky said in an email. “It is a terrific honor to be chosen and a great opportunity for him.”

A cross-campus partnership aims to help promote responsible innovation while building a community for academics and practitioners. 

Berkeley Law professor Kenneth Ayotte discusses the way controversial out-of-court deals are influencing Chapter 11 transactions.

“Lower-wage earners and people from minority and economically disadvantaged backgrounds largely don’t have the experience, time, money or access to counsel to challenge noncompetes,” said Des Lafleur, a clinical teaching fellow at UC Berkeley School of Law.

“The need for a special prosecutor was of course magnified by the earlier appointment of another one, Jack Smith, to look into Trump’s improper possession and handling of classified documents,” writes Dean Chemerinksy. “But there are crucial differences between the cases.”

It’s also easier for companies and the public to blame theft for store closures and retail struggles than admit stores’ over-expansion, strategy mistakes and customers abandoning stores for online shopping, said Jonathan Simon, a criminal justice professor at UC Berkeley School of Law. “It’s much more convenient if we can blame it on people we already consider reprehensible,” he said.

In conversation with Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of UC Berkeley School of Law, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar discussed soaking up every Supreme Court argument during the two years she clerked for Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.

Holly Doremus, a water rights expert and professor of environmental regulation at the Berkeley School Law discusses the cut backs on water imported to growers in California’s Imperial Valley from the Colorado River.

Responsible for conducting and supervising all Supreme Court litigation on behalf of the United States, Elizabeth Prelogar offers savvy advice for the law school’s future litigators.

Thanks to climate change, “we have and will continue to have too much water when we don’t want it and not enough when we do, and so storage is the key,” said Michael Kiparsky, water program director at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at University of California, Berkeley School of Law. “The fact that we’ve created this massive space underground holds the key to that problem.” 

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the University of California, Berkeley, Center for Law, Energy & the Environment discusses the recent controversy over gas vs. electric cooktops.

The report’s findings could potentially help support climate litigation against Exxon, Daniel Farber, professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, told CNN. “The more we learn about industry deception, the stronger the legal claims will be.” 

Dean Chemerinsky discusses his recent book Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism.

Privacy experts Catherine Crump and Rebecca Wexler take on key posts with the White House Domestic Policy Council and White House Office of Science Technology Policy, respectively.

A whopping 18 courses are available to Berkeley Law students for the first time this semester, including 3 focused on emerging areas in the corporate sector.

The Chronicle’s Bob Egelko reviews Dean Chemerinsky’s latest book, “A Momentous Year in the Supreme Court.”

The renowned civil procedure scholar says he’s “thrilled and humbled” by the opportunity to help shape the next evolution of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. 

The Supreme Court’s focus on the major questions doctrine could make the FTC’s clear power to issue the rule irrelevant, said Catherine Fisk, a workplace law professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

“Sometimes an especially momentous U.S. Supreme Court term is followed by a quieter year with fewer blockbuster decisions,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “But that is not what we should expect when the court hands down its rulings for this term in spring 2023.”

“It’s long past time for all Supreme Court proceedings to be livestreamed over video and archived, as is done in many federal appellate courts around the country,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Yet the high court has traditionally refused to allow any broadcasting of audio or video of its proceedings.”

The Berkeley Law alum calls the honor “major recognition that what I’ve been doing exemplifies the values of UC Berkeley.”

Lecturer Mallika Kaur talks to Judge Abby Abinante about about negotiating trauma and the law.

“The five conservative justices based their decision not on the purpose of Title 42, which is to stop the spread of a communicable disease, but on their partisan agreement with conservatives on immigration issues,” writes Dean Chemerinksy. “We should expect better of the court than that.”

Berkeley Law Professor Khiara M. Bridges discusses the biggest takeaways from 2022 and what to expect in 2023.

Twelve Pack: A dozen Berkeley Law homepage stories from 2022 that illustrate the school’s excellence, community, and public mission.

“Affordable housing, not handcuffs, is the only humane, effective and lawful solution to homelessness,” writes Jeffrey Selbin the Chancellor’s Clinical Professor of Law and co-director of the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

“This will allow us to strengthen our already outstanding criminal justice faculty, which are widely regarded as among the very best in the country,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Barry Tarlow was an eminent criminal defense attorney, and I am thrilled that we will honor his legacy by having a permanent chair named in his memory.”

“We know that the vast majority of people in pretrial detention in California are people of color, particularly Black and brown individuals,” said Rachel Wallace, clinical supervisor at UC Berkeley Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic. “And so we know that this is not only an economic issue, but a racial justice issue as well.”

Selected to discuss their work at the recent event in Miami, where the vast majority of presenters were faculty scholars, “is a big deal,” says Professor Katerina Linos.

“The Roberts court, more than any other court in history, uses its docket-setting discretion to select cases that allow it to revisit and overrule precedent,” Berkeley Law Professor Tejas Narechania found in the study, which will be published in the St. Louis University Law Journal and built on an earlier one in the Columbia Law Review.

Video and photos from Berkeley Law’s annual State Bar Swearing-In Ceremony.

Savala Nolan, Executive Director of the Henderson Center for Social Justice, reviews three books covering personal reflections by three women about art and adversity, fat-phobia and diaspora.

The current U.S. Supreme Court majority, Bridges argues, only remedies racism against people of color when it encounters something that resembles the pre-civil rights era, from poll taxes to eugenics.

“Revising the Electoral Count Act will not remedy other problems in our electoral system, especially the many state laws designed to disenfranchise minority voters,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “Congress must also pass legislation to further protect voting rights, but that seems unlikely given the likelihood that Senate Republicans would filibuster such a bill.”

Dean Chemerinsky said the appellate court should uphold the decision because “the 1929 statute was the basis for the 1952 reenactment, and it’s the basis of the law that exists today.”

The Barry Tarlow Chair in Criminal Justice will honor the renowned defense attorney’s legacy and create a new faculty position awarded to a tenured professor.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor John A. Powell discuss the passage of the “Respect for Marriage Act” in Congress.

Obasogie and UC Berkeley School of Public Health Professor Darlene Francis hold a casual but frank conversation about how their field can improve. 

UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who chaired the city’s elected charter reform commission in 1999, said he thought the new proposal was a great idea, noting his commission had initially proposed an independent redistricting panel before the current structure was created.

“Does a state supreme court have the power to find that an act of the state legislature violates the state constitution? The answer to that question should be clear and obvious, but the conservative justices of the Supreme Court expressed doubt about it at oral arguments in Moore vs. Harper on Wednesday,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “It is not hyperbole to say that the future of American democracy may turn on the court’s answer.”

“The Constitution and American democracy would not survive another four years of Trump being president,” writes Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and professor of law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. “We now have Trump’s own words to prove it.”

A study from Berkeley Judicial Institute on law clerk selection and diversity is discussed. 

Dean Chemerinsky discusses rankings at US News.

Des Lafleur, a business attorney and lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Law who consults with companies on minimizing risk, said cybersecurity is something companies should be thinking about well before employees depart the company.

“There is always a tension between liberty and equality. Any law that prohibits discrimination limits the freedom to discriminate.” writes Dean Chemerinksy.

“The system is not set up to deal with the underlying problems. It’s set up to deal with the legal problems,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge in San Jose who now heads the Berkeley Judicial Institute at UC Berkeley School of Law. “The system is in some ways rigid and inflexible.”

“The judges we interviewed were thoughtful, sincere, and serious about their commitment to law clerk diversity as each of them defines it,” said the study’s co-author, former California federal Judge and head of the Berkeley Judicial Institute at UC Berkeley School of Law Jeremy Fogel. “The challenge for many of them is translating that commitment into specific practices that actually achieve the outcomes they seek.” 

“Boosting public transit could also have the added environmental benefit of limiting the production of new electric vehicles,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. “Cars take a lot of energy to manufacture and dispose of, and while electricity is a much cleaner fuel than petroleum, it’s far better to avoid buying a car in the first place,” he said. 

The Berkeley Judicial Institute’s new study on law clerk diversity is featured.

“It is much too soon to know what the impact of these developments will be on law schools and legal education,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean at UC Berkeley’s law school.

Dean Chemerinsky writes about two arguments in the Supreme Court.

Dean Chemerinksy discusses originalism and the Supreme Court.

“It came as no surprise in 2015 when the Department of Justice decided to close the criminal investigation in the United States and decided not to pursue charges against the agents,” said Berkeley Law’s International Human Rights Law Clinic co-director Roxanna Altholz.

Members of the school’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment and its California-China Climate Institute meet with key leaders and drive solutions to pressing issues.

The Humphrey Report from UC Berkeley School of Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic is cited in an editorial on bail in California.

The book project was an intellectual as well as a physical journey for Abrams, who needed to add new skills to her research toolbox to pull it off.

Dean Chemerinsky’s book Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism is included in David Lat’s spotlight of noteworthy new books about or related to the law.

Jeff Selbin, the director of the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law discusses California’s new law that will automatically seal most criminal records for those who complete their sentences.

 Berkeley Law professor John Yoo  said, the enactment of Proposition 209 kept the goal of racial diversity on the university’s front burner. “In a way it became culturally more deeply rooted now at the university than it was back in 1996,” he said.

“For years, CBP has also struggled with fully investigating and disciplining  its own agents for using excessive force on the job,” said Roxanna Altholz, co-director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. “Federal law prohibits victims from successfully filing civil lawsuits against Border Patrol agents, making accountability of them even more difficult.”

UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who has argued cases before the Supreme Court, said its past rulings on health issues, particularly the 2012 decision upholding most of the federal health care law, probably wouldn’t weaken the legal case for abortion rights.

“Sometimes rankings can do more harm than good,” said Dean Chemerinsky. “If the rankings are measuring the wrong things, then they’re not providing the right information.” 

“In Silicon Valley, there has historically been a don’t follow the rules mentality, because that’s how you get ahead,” said Steven Davidoff Solomon of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law. “Holmes may be the first, but I suspect there are going to be more.”

Berkeley Law’s dean Erwin Chemerinsky, along with University of Wisconsin’s Law School dean Daniel Tokaji, write about the ABA’s proposal to eliminate standardized tests for law school admissions. “At a minimum, we need more study and more data on the potential impact of such a radical change in admissions standards to avoid potential consequences to diversity, equity, and inclusion that are the opposite of what is intended,” write Chemerinsky and Tokaji.

A whopping 106 Berkeley Law students are participating in the program this semester, the most in Director Sue Schechter’s 16 years at the school.

Lecturer Shanin Specter discusses US Rep. Conor Lamb joining his firm Kline & Specter.

“Of all the potentially momentous cases on the Supreme Court’s docket this term, the one that frightens me most is Moore v. Harper. It is not hyperbole to say that the future of American democracy could be determined by this decision,” writes Dean Chemerinksy.

Dean Chemerinksy writes, “The great complexity of free speech issues on campus was revealed this semester at Berkeley Law. How are the free speech rights of a student group to not invite speakers with particular views to be balanced against the desire to have all viewpoints expressed and have no one feel excluded?”

Mass Media at Berkeley Law guest Mike Gillis describes charting new terrain to protect parody in support of an Ohio man whose Facebook page spoofed a local police department. 

“Nothing about Berkeley Law is fundamentally changed by this decision,” Dean Chemerinsky said. “We will be the law school we’ve always been, and we will strive to improve in accordance with our values.”

Dean Chemerinsky said the decision is not “railing against rankings” or complaining that it’s “hurt” Berkeley Law’s standing, but that the school has issues with U.S. News’ process, which has remained unchanged in the face of the law school’s complaints.

“Although rankings are inevitable and inevitably have some arbitrary features, there are aspects of the U.S. News rankings that are profoundly inconsistent with our values and public mission,” UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said in a statement. “Now is a moment when law schools need to express to U.S. News that they have created undesirable incentives for legal education.”

“Although rankings are inevitable and inevitably have some arbitrary features, there are aspects of the U.S. News rankings that are profoundly inconsistent with our values and public mission,” Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said in a note to the school community.

“What we found is that no one had really done a city-specific, CAP-specific analysis, so we were kind of starting from scratch,” said Ted Lamm, a senior research fellow at Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. “You can set as ambitious targets as you want. But if you don’t provide them the budget and the funds and the actual implementation tools to do it, it’s going to be a plan and nothing else.”

“We have one of the most vibrant urban squash programs for youth in the world at the Specter Center in West Philadelphia, combined with the Lenfest Center in North Philadelphia,” said Lecturer Shanin Specter. “This comes at a time when we Philadelphians are desperately trying to save the youth of our city. The Specter Center is a shining light of hope against desperation.”

“We are seeing a tremendous wave of worker organizing efforts across the country and this is another way I think that workers can raise their voices and be directly involved in raising standards in industry,” said Christina Chung, executive director of the Center for Law and Work at U.C. Berkeley Law School. “It’s really exciting, and I think other states will follow suit.”

The changes will enable more public interest-minded graduates to access the program, receive increased funding, and spend less of their own money on student loan expenses.

“There is a longstanding history of the military not being held accountable for sexual assaults that take place under its watch,” said Rose Carmen Goldberg, a veterans law lecturer at the University of California School of Law.

“The governor has standing,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the UC Berkeley School of Law. “And it’s confusing to the voters when you see him saying ‘vote no’ on something that otherwise seems like Democrats, who make up the majority of registered voters, would want to support.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean at UC Berkeley, said the court has dramatically changed its interpretation of language in the First Amendment that prohibits any law “respecting an establishment of religion.”

“It’s a complicated and unique area of the law with its own statutes and regulations,” said Lecturer Rose Carmen Goldberg.

Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the UC Berkeley School of Law discusses COP 27 in Egypt.

It’s “clear” that the cost of carbon emissions isn’t zero, according to University of California Berkeley law professor Dan Farber.

David Carrillo and Stephen M. Duvernay of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law write “There is one major disadvantage from making it difficult to remove judges, through rules or culture (or both): You can be stuck with a bad actor for life.” 

“The number one thing they’re going to worry about is the ability to pay back the loans,” said Berkeley Law professor Adam Badawi “Twitter misses a debt payment, that trips a covenant, and the loanholders can come in and say the debt is due right now.”

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recently considered the 2010 fatal beating of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas, thanks to years of work from the International Human Rights Law Clinic. 

“The First Amendment may limit state regulation of projections, however,” Seth Davis, a professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, told SFGATE. “It may protect a right to project statements on buildings in some cases. For example, the First Amendment may protect a right to project a political statement on a building when that statement is connected to the building.” 

“This will reinforce concerns that the banking industry already has, and also concerns that major investors have, about the fossil-fuel industry and whether it’s a good investment,” Berkeley Law professor Dan Farber told Al Jazeera. “So I think this definitely puts pressure on them, the longer these cases stick around.”

“There are lots of cases involving workers who work somewhat autonomously who have nevertheless successfully unionized,” said Catherine Fisk, professor of labor law at UC Berkeley School of Law.

UC Berkeley ceramic artist and fellow veteran Ehren Tool helps Berkeley Law vets design mugs that connect with their formative military experience.

UC Berkeley law Professor Emily Zhang believes that many people impacted by Prop. 17 are unaware that they are newly eligible to vote. “A law changing can only do so much. There’s the second part, which is to make sure people know about the law,” Zhang said. 

“I’ve looked at some of the language in the executive agreements. It’s totally baseless for [Musk] to seek termination with cause,” said Adam Badawi, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. “To get terminated with cause, the circumstances have to be extreme, they have to kind of be malfeasance or someone did something illegal. 

University of California at Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk discusses how the WARN Act may apply to the layoffs at Twitter.

With basic rights in peril at home and around the world, the law school community is answering the call.

Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean at UC Berkeley who has argued a number of cases before the Supreme Court, said he doesn’t think Thomas needs to remove himself from cases in which his wife is part of an organization that supports one of the parties, unless that organization is actually a party to the case. 

Megan Graham, supervising attorney at the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at University of California Berkeley School of Law comments on the affidavit Santa Rosa Police used to secure a search warrant on Vice Mayor Eddie Alvarez.

Hailing from 41 countries, 246 students bring a vast array of experiences and perspectives to the school from across the globe.

David A. Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at UC Berkeley School of Law discusses the California’s Proposition 1.

“What provokes the case is long-standing community dissatisfaction with BAAQMD which has not listened to the community,” said Steve Castleman, a clinical supervising attorney for Berkeley’s Environmental Law Clinic. “This is a long-standing problem with especially low-income and minority communities like those around AB&I in East Oakland.”

University of California, Berkeley law professor John Yoo discusses The U.S. Supreme Court’s race related cases.

Berkeley Law’s growing Clinical Program adds 14 new hires to further its mission and train more students.

“Lowell claimed 1920s Jewish quota was intended to increase diversity by avoiding concentrations of Northeastern city dwellers,” writes David B. Oppenheimer, law professor at Berkeley Law and James N. Bierman, a former assistant dean of admissions at Harvard Law School and a lawyer in the District of Columbia. “As the Supreme Court plans to take up affirmative action, his policies are being cited in an effort to keep Black and Latino students out of Harvard.”

“Either Harvard needs to take a hard look at cultural bias in its admissions process, or Asian applicants to Harvard need to spend less of their scarce time on academics and more on personality development,” writes Prasad Krishnamurthy, professor of law at U.C. Berkeley School of Law.

“The long history of racial discrimination in America and current inequalities in educational opportunity make affirmative action essential,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “Affirmative action works.”

“The last 3 years have been the driest 3 year period on record,” said Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute.

Professor Pamela Samuelson breaks down the recent oral arguments over whether an Andy Warhol print of a Prince photograph violates the photographer’s copyright.

David A. Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at UC Berkeley School of Law discusses the California Supreme Court.

Dean Chemerinsky discusses the Supreme Court’s six Republican-appointed justices and weighs in on who is the conservative wing’s true leader.

Lecturer Shanin Specter discusses Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman.

Dean Chemerinsky’s opinion on Propostion 1 is cited in an article on the California gubernatorial debate. UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky told The Chronicle in September, “ I think that the clear intent is to protect current law, which protects abortions until viability. It does not create an absolute right to abortion; just as other rights in the state Constitution are not absolute.”

Dean Chemerinsky discusses whether the Interstate Commerce Clause restricts states from regulating in-state conduct that has a substantial impact on mostly out-of-state producers.

Hewlett tells Berkeley Law students, “Don’t hesitate to make the change you want to see, don’t be afraid to challenge yourself, and don’t be afraid to dream big.”

“It is now necessary for us to consider options that would, in previous generations, be considered unthinkable,” said Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute.

They’re working with an alliance of legal aid organizations, immigration law experts, a former judge, and affected veterans, under the supervision of Lecturer Rose Carmen Goldberg. 

“Where once there were forests and fields and wetlands that would soak up the rain, these have been paved over and replaced with surfaces that do not absorb rain,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute. Those are hard materials like concrete sidewalks, asphalt roads, and roofs, which funnel runoff into gutters, storm drains, and sewers. 

“I can understand why smaller players wouldn’t want to be grouped with Meta,” said Andrew Bradt, professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. “Meta is the 800-pound gorilla, and the fear of guilt by association is understandable. On the other hand, I didn’t find their argument [about] the individualized nature of the applications persuasive at all. There are obvious efficiencies to be gained through centralized pretrial proceedings here, and I think the panel did the right thing.” 

Dean Chemerinsky discusses California’s Proposition 1, the ballot measure to add abortion rights directly into the state Constitution.

UC Berkeley law professor Ian Haney López’s comment to the New York Times about the current political and partisan state of play among Hispanic voters going into the 2022 elections is cited in Harold Meyerson’s OpEd.

Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment and Daniel Farber, law professor at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment discuss a proposal by the Biden administration to require all states to track and reduce on-road vehicle greenhouse gas emissions.

With a long track record of working to protect election integrity, Wayment has elevated her advocacy for a more representative democracy while at Berkeley Law.

“Not remotely a surprise,” tweeted Orin Kerr, a criminal law professor at the University of California’s Berkeley Law and former Supreme Court law clerk. “Still, it’s good not to be surprised.”

“It was stunning that it was her second day of oral arguments as a justice,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law. “No one was more active in questioning. I also had the sense in that case that she was very conscious of her role as a Black justice and the importance of being a voice against discrimination and for remedies.”

“As with white voters, the most important predictors of support for Republicans track racial resentment as well as anxiety over racial status, Ian Haney López, law professor at the University of California, Berkeley tells columnist Thomas B. Edsall. “Rather than an ideological sorting, we are witnessing a racial sorting among Latinos — not in terms of anything so simple as skin color, but rather, in terms of those who seek a higher status for themselves by more closely identifying on racial grounds with the white mainstream, versus those who give less priority to race, or even see Latinos as a nonwhite racial group.”

UC Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges was a guest speaker at the inaugural Berkeleyside Idea Makers event where she spoke about the movement for reproductive justice and the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson.

“Last term showed six conservative justices who have a very conservative agenda for the law and are aggressively implementing it,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. “I think we’ll see that again this year.”

Lecturer Shanin Specter and attorney Robert A. Clifford write in their OpEd, “Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has imposed $201 million in fines against Boeing and its CEO for misleading investors about the safety of the planes involved. However, there is still a need for criminal investigations into Boeing CEOs Dennis Muilenburg and David Calhoun.”

The student group Arts & Innovation Representation kicks off the platform with episodes addressing music sampling, international restitution, and COVID-19’s impact on live theater.

“If Hastings’ family had a contract with the state, as shown in a document from 1878 with signatures from both sides, it might still be a binding agreement that could not be changed by future legislation,”said David A. Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at UC Berkeley School of Law and is not involved in the court case. “But if there is no such document, Carrillo said, the Legislature that passed the 1878 law ‘cannot bind the hands of a future Legislature.'”

“The absence of drama around the California court arguably shows that it better reflects California society, and the rancor on the U.S. Supreme Court and political arguments about reforming that court suggest that it is misaligned with society at large,” said David Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at UC Berkeley Law School.

UC Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges discusses what’s at stake for Black communities following the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. 

During his recent Leadership Lunch Series appearance, West described how Uber went about reforming its culture and urged students to show courage in their legal careers.

Dean Chemerinsky joins host Kimberly Atkins Stohr to discuss the Supreme Court’s new term.

“If you trespass on a football field, with huge men who tackle people for a living,” said Andrew Bradt, professor of law at UC Berkeley, “it’s probably foreseeable that you’re gonna get tackled by a huge person.”

“Generally, I think these sort of subnational statements are important, politically and symbolically, because they can help push national governments to more on climate action,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

The court’s opinion closely followed the arguments by Ninth Circuit Practicum students Nicole Conrad ’22 and Joya Manjur ’22 and has powerful potential for other asylum seekers.  

“It’s clear that the conservative justices regard race discrimination in voting as a thing of the past and therefore seek to limit or eliminate the Voting Rights Act,” said Dean Chemerinsky. “If the court follows this path, it will further limit protections against race discrimination in our electoral system.”

“The court is not going to save us. It is going to let Trump do whatever he wants to do. And it’s going to help him get away with it,” said Professor Khiara M. Bridges in response to the court’s decision on Trump v. Hawaii.

“As the Supreme Court begins its new term on Monday, it’s clear that the court’s majority is determined to move the law much further to the right.” writes Dean Chemerinsky.

Dean Chemerinsky discusses the Supreme Court.

The new offerings include Environmental Justice and Health Equity, Environmental Justice and Advocacy in California, and Environmental Health Law Through Film.

“The October 2021 term was one of the most momentous in history: The court overruled Roe v. Wade, greatly expanded gun rights, aggressively protected free exercise of religion and significantly limited administrative agency power”, Dean Chemerinsky writes. “There is no doubt that the coming term, too, will be filled with blockbuster decisions.”  

The student-run journal sits at the pinnacle of the academic landscape, publishing groundbreaking environmental law scholarship four times a year. 

Dean Chemerinsky discusses the Supreme Court’s upcoming term.

“Ideally, you’d see … the Public Utilities Commission, the Air Resources Board and the Energy Commission having a real unified strategy on this, with a clear end date” for natural gas use, said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. That hasn’t happened, at least not publicly, he said, but “you’re starting to see it piecemeal.”

“California state law might be more amenable to facts that suggest a business who put products on Amazon felt that they couldn’t offer their products on rival platforms,” said UC Berkeley School of Law professor Prasad Krishnamurthy.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment discusses regulations to
ban the sale of diesel trucks by 2040. 

Dean Chemerinsky discusses the impact of the recent Supreme Court rulings. “At this point in time, the court is ideologically divided the same way our society is divided,” said Chemerinsky. 

The Our Better Web initiative examines how the prevalence of deceptive and exploitative content threatens the health of communities and U.S. democracy.

Jonathan Glater, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said that the government’s options for dealing with schools’ misconduct had never been “prophylactic — they operate after the fact.”

“If Congress adopts a law prohibiting abortions, that would pre-empt state laws to the contrary,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the UC Berkeley law school dean.

Lecturer Shanin Specter answers medical malpractice questions.

Professor Khiara M. Bridges discusses the “period pill.”

Eight visiting law school teams embrace the adrenaline ride of getting their case packet just 45 minutes before each round starts and careening through speedy mock trials.

Lecturer Shanin Specter commented “The recent indication of agreement to one debate in late October may be seen by voters as too little and too late, especially for those who vote by mail,” said Mr. Specter, who donates to candidates in both parties.

“Once you say that it is an ‘unborn human being,’ then it’s a short step to saying that laws allowing abortion are unconstitutional because they deny equal protection to those persons that are unborn human beings,” said Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. 

David A. Carrillo, executive director of Berkeley Law’s California Constitution center, said adding abortion rights to California’s constitution would give Attorney General Rob Bonta a “major new weapon to combat Congressional overreach.”

Interview with Dean Erwin Chemerinsky on his new book, “Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism.”  

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, discusses how California will manage an increased demand on the electric grid with persistent heat waves and increased sales of EVs.

Andrea Roth, a Berkeley Law professor whose research focuses on the use of forensic science in criminal trials notes that some “biometric” techniques had their beginnings in racism or eugenics to try to identify “criminal” or “abnormal” biological attributes. The man sometimes called the father of fingerprinting, Sir Francis Galton, is known for being an unapologetic racist, among other examples, Roth added.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law discusses his new book “Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism.”

Dean Chemerinsky writes, originalism is in its ascendancy on the Supreme Court. In case after case in the last term, the conservative justices based their decisions on their cramped reading of American history.

Originalism is primarily about how courts should interpret the Constitution, writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. That leads to an obvious threshold question: How did the Framers intend the courts to do this?

“If a judge can tell a different branch of government, ‘I’m taking over your job,’ then how does the executive branch function?” said Orin Kerr, a University of California, Berkeley law professor and an expert on criminal procedure.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, discusses how to manage an increased demand on the electric grid as sales of EVs increases.

Released today, Worse Than Nothing provides a deep legal and historical analysis and argues that the increasingly popular method for understanding the Constitution is unworkable. 

Voters should see through the “reform” sham to the truth: Recalls have little to do with hyperpartisanship, and under cover of reforming the recall, the Legislature is stripping power from voters, write David A. Carrillo and Joshua Spivak of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law.

The faculty director of Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center continues to help people worldwide search for an answer to the agonizing question, Where is my child?

Alexa Koenig, executive director of Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and a lecturer at the law and journalism schools along with three other Berkeley experts discuss the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and what it reveals about the changing nature of the court, and what lawmakers are likely to do next.

“We can get loud, do the work, and continue to show up, even when it’s hard,” Jade Williams ’24 says. 

The legislature is trying to say “look, we did reform the recall,” but what this really means is “sucks to be you, general law cities,” say Stephen M. Duvernay and Joshua Spivak of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law

“Housing policy often gets lost in climate discussions, but this is actually one of the best ways that we can reduce emissions,” said Ethan Elkind, a law professor and climate expert at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, discusses California’s plans to phase out sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035.

New clerks credit the school’s Career Development Office staff for demystifying the clerkship application process and providing vital support. 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes The California Legislature should strengthen the Racial Justice Act, passed two years ago to discourage racial bias in sentencing. He says a bill on the Senate floor would do just that, but it still needs work.

“This legislation will show that you can actually do this without causing the economy to collapse,” said Catherine Fisk, faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Work and the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. “And so I think there’s nowhere to go but up from here.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, said that at this point, almost any new gun control law is subject to a constitutional challenge.

“There is much to celebrate,” write Professor Jonathan D. Glater and co-author UC Irvine School of Law Professor Dalié Jiménez. “And then there is the big picture, which remains grim. This mass cancellation – politically unimaginable just five years ago – is not the end of the student loan crisis.”

Savala Nolan, executive director of the Center for Social Justice writes that Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan doesn’t do enough for black Americans. “I don’t begrudge anybody having their loans forgiven under this new policy even if I won’t get relief; I do, however, lament the administration’s failure to properly weigh the role that wealth plays, or should play, in student loan forgiveness. I mean wealth as distinct from income–wealth meaning assets that can be passed from generation to generation.”

California historically leads the way regarding emissions due to a carve-out in the US Clean Air Act, according to Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at UC Berkeley Law. It is the only state in the US that can make emissions standard mandates beyond the federal government’s. But the law also permits other US states to adopt California’s standards without the federal government’s approval, Elkind said.

The Policy Advocacy Clinic is tackling restitution, a financial charge which saddles people with lifelong debt, adding to its nationwide work eliminating juvenile legal system fees and fines.

“The danger of this type of case is that a court might be drawn, by the artistic nature of the product at issue, to favor 1st Amendment and artistic expression concerns over consumer protection concerns,” said Ted Mermin, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice. “But on a common sense level, [we] know that if we are buying an album that is marketed as being the songs of Michael Jackson, it had better have the songs of Michael Jackson.”

A change in leadership of Berkeley Law’s clinics arrives as the surging program adds faculty and plans to add more clinics.

Berkeley Law Professor Rebecca Wexler will help lead the center, which aims to help users gain more control of their data, democratize access to it, and ensure that it remains secure.

“It’s easy to believe that locking people up for longer periods of time makes us safer,” write Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, former Los Angeles County district attorney Gil Garcetti, and Miriam Aroni Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution. “But there is no evidence that extreme sentences improve public safety.”

David A. Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center, says diversifying the court first became a priority under former Gov. Jerry Brown in the 1970s. “Doing so is crucial to both the perception and the reality that those who administer justice reflect the state’s diversity,” Carrillo says. “The judge in my case doesn’t have to look like me, but it shouldn’t be true that there are no judges who look like me.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo discuss the nomination. “This is two-sevenths of the California Supreme Court, and these are people who are going to be there for a long time,” Chemerinsky says. “They are historic and important appointments.” Guerrero’s appointment also makes sense politically, Carrillo says, as appointing the first Latina chief justice “speaks directly to the nearly 40% of the California population with Hispanic ancestry.”

Now a visiting scholar with Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center, Qazizada is part of a unique program that brings threatened Afghan scholars to the Bay Area.

Mallika Kaur, lecturer and the executive director of the community outreach and advocacy organization Sikh Family Center, said there was a range of reactions from the Sikh community after the shooting, including anger and fear but also resilience. “There was absolutely the fear of being further victimized, what may happen next to our kids, what may happen to the male or female members who are wearing turbans in the community,” she said.

“The Electoral Count Reform Act is a major and necessary step forward. The perfect cannot be allowed to be the enemy of the good,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and co-authors Laurence H. Tribe and Dennis Aftergut write of the legislation now under consideration in Congress. “But given the reality of the election-denying officials and battleground state legislature majorities, Congress should not allow the good that the current reform measure achieves to potentially be swallowed by state representatives who would enact undemocratic power grabs that all of us, including our federal legislators, might wish we didn’t have to see.”

Fractional trading brokerages like Robinhood, meanwhile, are “a fly in the ointment,” to Buffett, says Professor Robert Bartlett, who co-authored a new study finding volumes of the most expensive stock in the U.S. have been artificially inflated by the way brokers like Robinhood report fractional trading. “Buffett wants to keep the price of his Class A shares high to attract long-term value investors. Those aren’t the people buying these fractional shares, and so they are undermining his main vision for the stock.”

“Senate Bill 1149 would create a presumption against secrecy in civil litigation in cases involving a defective product or environmental hazard that ‘has caused or is likely to cause significant or substantial bodily injury or illness or death,'” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes of legislation now under consideration in Sacramento. “This is a commonsense and long-overdue reform.”

Palmer’s work at the United Nations Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals helps prosecute war crimes committed within the former Yugoslavia.

“We had an extraordinary year in hiring,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says, including two senior scholars, three junior faculty, and a clinical professor.

“The proposal before the Senate represents an excellent beginning. It must be strengthened to protect democracy in the final stages of selecting a president. But it’s equally vital to remember that not even a perfect way of counting the electoral votes at the tail end of the process can overcome unfair and undemocratic obstacles to casting ballots at the front end,” write Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, Harvard Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe, and former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut. “Our democracy will not be secure until we enact broader protection for voting rights.”

“One thing that might have triggered this wave of litigation is that cities have become aware in the past 15 years that climate change is costing them money,” Professor Holly Doremus says. “That’s especially true for coastal cities, counties and states, where a lot of these cases are coming from. I think just looking for any way to deal with this problem has sent them to the state courts.”

Titus founded the Whistleblower Anti-Bullying Resource Network (WARN), which helps whistleblowers, survivors of workplace bullying and harassment, and people who have experienced police abuse.

Lecturer Mallika Kaur’s book Faith, Gender and Activism in the Punjab conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper is reviewed.

David A. Carrillo and Brandon V. Stracener of the California Constitution Center write that if proposed state laws copying the citizen enforcement mechanism of Texas’ S.B. 8 survive, one might eventually turn up on the ballot as an initiative, posing “a grave threat to a minority group, who will fail to defeat the proposition because (as a minority) they lack the votes.” 

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, discusses the challenges for California’s planned route from San Francisco to Los Angeles. 

“If there is a stable source of funding both for wildfire and EVs, then you create the ability to plan in a more profound way,” says Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, of the debate over Proposition 30, which would  raise income taxes on people earning more than $2 million a year to fund zero-emission vehicle purchases and infrastructure.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses Gorsuch’s role in closely-divided cases this term. 

“It’s ridiculous to think that we should look to the laws of 1791 and 1868 to ascertain whether there should be a right to public prayer or abortion.” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the mindset governing the flurry of recent decisions from the conservative-dominated court. “It’s highly doubtful that we would even want to follow certain practices enshrined in the Constitution.”

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo is among those quoted to analyze Gov. Gavin Newsom’s next move. Elevating a sitting justice gives the governor “the appearance of making two appointments: one to elevate a new Chief Justice, and one to fill the vacated seat,” Carrillo says.

“In recent years the California Supreme Court has coalesced into a group of moderate justices who decide nearly 90% of their cases unanimously, and Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye’s retirement may be an inflection point for that dynamic,” California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo says. “So one factor in choosing a new Chief Justice is how likely that person is to continue the court’s current consensus culture.”

Chair of the California Privacy Protection Agency, Urban illuminated the arc of privacy awareness — and importance — to Americans amid technology’s expanding reach.

Lecturer Mallika Kaur interviews Traci Feit Love, about pro bono organizing efforts and Lawyers for Good Government, a nonprofit that grew out of a popular Facebook group she started in 2016. 

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, says it’s safe to assume that the historic commute patterns likely will never fully return to what they were before the pandemic, so transit providers will need to find other ways to attract more riders. “I think it’s going to be really hard to get back to that level of ridership unless you grow the overall pie,” he says. “Their best strategy is making sure there are more apartments and office buildings right next to transit. If people live really close to a transit stop they’re going to be much more likely to ride that to get where they want to go for recreational activities or for work.”

“The new California law, like the Texas law, limits how a defendant can challenge its provisions in court, but it is not immune from review in the courts,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes of new legislation which authorizes private citizens to file civil suits against gun makers and sellers in three circumstances and is based on Texas’ law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. “Once challenged, courts should uphold the regulations as reasonable and consistent with the Second Amendment.”

Wu’s externship with a U.S. district court’s patent program enriches her understanding of technology and intellectual property issues and enlightens her career path.

The authors of the Constitution “believed the Bill of Rights wasn’t creating rights but was recognizing rights that were already out there,” says Professor Daniel Farber, author of Retained by the People, a 2007 book about the Ninth Amendment. The current court’s majority “has basically ignored” that amendment, he says, most likely because “it looks like a wide-open invitation and it doesn’t really say anything about how you decide what’s covered.”

“It’s said that a society is measured by how we treat the worst among us, the most marginalized, the most despised,” Death Penalty Clinic Co-Director Elisabeth Semel tells columnist Nicholas Goldberg. “The law applies to everybody. We don’t get to pick and choose.” 

The best efforts standard is vague and can be difficult to gauge, Professor Adam Badawi says, and establishing that someone has breached a best efforts obligation requires pretty extreme conduct. “You can’t hook someone up to a machine and figure out how much they’re trying,” he says. 

“This data tracking is…it means that people who are pregnant and seeking access to medical care (are) extraordinarily vulnerable to having their data sold to vigilantes as well as provided voluntarily to law enforcement or obtained by law enforcement across state lines,” Professor Rebecca Wexler, a  co-faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, told the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and a co-author outline the dearth of even attempted recall of state judges, pointing out that then-Supreme Court Justice Rose Bird, ’65 didn’t face a recall, but was instead not retained by voters in the 1986 general election. “A once-cumbersome and ineffective judicial discipline resulted in a substantial constitutional reform, which produced a far-more-effective discipline system centralized in the Commission on Judicial Performance,” they write. “Although the voters have always had the option since 1911 to recall any bench officer, they have done so only rarely, and never at the appellate level. ” 

The Center for Law, Energy & the Environment brought together three experts for a recent webinar to discuss the implications of the ruling for climate policy.

On July 12, Professor Khiara M. Bridges testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about the fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. Bridges’ exchanges with several senators, particularly Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, drew extensive media coverage. 

“It’s unclear where the court is going to draw the line,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says of states’ efforts to enact new regulations. “I think there’s a strong argument that all of these are constitutional. There’s also going to be an argument that they are unconstitutional. I think it’s important to adopt the laws and then see where the court is going to draw the line.”

With a modest approach and a client list full of industry giants, Edelman describes his unexpected rise in entertainment law and the movie-like moment that launched it.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky offers his analysis of the just-completed Supreme Court term, including the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. 

Professor John Yoo unpacks the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, as well as other recent Supreme Court rulings. 

“It’s up to states, really, as to how they want to go about making abortion unacceptable,” Professor Khiara M. Bridges says, predicting the argument over whether the federal government can protect access to abortion pills, particularly mifepristone, “a long-term battle.” 

“The argument for settling at something lower is that litigation is expensive,” Professor Adam Badawi says of Musk’s effort to back out of his $44 billion deal to buy the social media network. “And this thing is so messy that it might not be worth it.”

“The working class people have been pushed outside L.A. because the region hasn’t built enough housing for them,” says Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, and author of the book Railtown. He and other critics say that while the region has spent billions on rail, it has shot itself in the foot by not reforming its zoning laws and allowing high-density housing to be built near transit hubs while still requiring new apartment developments to build parking spaces for all residents. 

Having grown up “with a ball at my feet,” Abunaw helps athletes and coaches obtain visas to train and compete in the United States long term.

Adam Sterling, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business, predicts an eventual court settlement that allows both sides to save face. “Twitter has an obligation to fight Musk on this, which they’d need to do because they have a fiduciary duty to do what’s best for shareholders and salvage the deal,” he says. 

Lecturer Shanin Specter, who won many of the pre-pandemic verdicts against Johnson & Johnson, cautions against assuming jurors’ mindsets have shifted. “Our experience was that good cases were bringing good verdicts, and bad cases were bringing bad verdicts,” he says. “I see absolutely no between the juries now or during the pandemic, or before the pandemic.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Daniel Farber discuss the potential impact of the West Virginia v. EPA ruling. The ruling “is very vague about what is a major question or what is sufficient specificity to meet it, the court has opened the door to challenges to countless agency actions,” Chemerinsky says. “I think his fundamental objection is, EPA is leveraging a tiny pedal (of regulatory authority) in the Clean Air Act and using it to take over the world,” Farber says of Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion. “It goes beyond the role that Congress gave them in dealing with emissions from specific sources into trying to change the whole energy system.”

Professor Jonathan Simon says there’s no easy way for Jenkins to make a quick impact on crime, or even to significantly affect the jail population. “I think most of the rapid change is what we’ve already gotten: a big change in tone and lots of reminders of the things her predecessor was alleged to have done wrong,” he says. 

“The conservatives on the court turned their ideological beliefs into constitutional doctrine,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes. “This is not the culmination of conservative judicial activism, this is a court that is just getting started.”

Participants in the executive education course Corporate Finance Fundamentals describe its far-reaching benefits and praise the school’s collaboration with Ukrainian Global University.

Professor Daniel Farber calls the Supreme Court’s ruling “more than a flesh wound” but not fatal. The majority opinion still allows the EPA other options to regulate coal-fired power plants, he adds. “Some people are portraying it as a huge disaster; I don’t think it’s as bad as that,” he says. “It’s a serious setback, but it’s one that we can move past.”

“It’s so disingenuous to say that we’re just going to allow political majorities in the state to determine the legality of abortion when not everybody in the state is going to be able to vote because of what Republicans are doing and because of what the Court is allowing them to do,” Professor Khiara M. Bridges says. “Our democracy is undeserving of that label.”

Megan Graham, of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, says any battle between the tech companies and governments about data collection should be done in public, so that regular people and privacy advocates can have their say. “Google’s voice is obviously important in the discussion because they have the data and they are the ones running he searches but their interests are not necessarily the same as the general public, or people who are concerned about privacy rights,” she says. 

Beginning Aug. 15, Plaut will oversee building, supporting, and maintaining UC Berkeley’s faculty in close collaboration with deans, department chairs, and Academic Senate colleagues.

Professor Daniel Farber says the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, which holds that the agency doesn’t have broad authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, is a hit to the fight against climate change but doesn’t completely tie the Biden administration’s hands. California’s strong laws will shield the state from much of the ruling’s impact, although the state does get electricity from affected states, he says. 

Luker, who co-founded Berkeley Law’s Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice, has interviewed hundreds of women about their experiences before and after the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling.

Galbreath is general counsel at Bitwise Industries, which builds tech economies in underestimated cities and helps marginalized people access opportunities in the industry.

“We live our lives online, we leave digital breadcrumbs of our prior activities, and of course those are going to be caught up in abortion investigations,” says Professor Catherine Crump, director of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic. Tech companies will almost certainly comply with state law and hand over information from legal court orders, but they should be transparent with their users and the public when they do and disclose how many abortion-related court orders they get, she adds.

Human Rights Center Executive Director Alexa Koenig discusses the growing use of open source intelligence (OSINT) as a way to document international atrocities and bolster human rights prosecutions. 

In a time of concern about a rise in retail theft, some politicians are seizing on viral videos to paint left-leaning city leaders as soft on crime. “These crimes deserve to be taken seriously, but they are also being weaponized ahead of the midterm elections,” Professor Jonathan Simon says. 

Phillip Gomez ’23 founded the Latino Rifle Association to create an alternative to traditional gun rights groups for Latinos interested in self-defense.

“If you have a period tracking app, you should delete it,” says Professor Catherine Crump, director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Policy Clinic. “Tech companies like everyone else has to comply with law and they may not have a choice about what data they collect, what data they are forced to disclose. The law enforcement agency gets a warrant and serves it on Google and asks for location information and it’s a valid warrant. Google is going to have a hard time not complying with that.”

“Someday, when there is a liberal Supreme Court, it likely will overrule Dobbs and again recognize a constitutional right to abortion. But in the years and perhaps decades until that happens, abortion will be the defining political issue for the U.S.,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes. “It is unclear what that will mean for our political system … The central question in the abortion debate is who should decide.”

“It is stunning how far and how fast the conservative justices have moved to overrule constitutional law principles in a single week,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes about the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District case involving prayer in schools. “It’s clear that they would have decided countless cases over the last half-century differently from their predecessors, and have no hesitation eliminating precedents they don’t like. The implications for all of our rights and the society we will live in is staggering.”

Professor Rebecca Wexler, a faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, talks about how big and small tech companies will need to have a response to the question of what to do with users’ data if new laws try to restrict access to information about abortion and other reproductive services in the post-Roe environment. “Anything they do or don’t do, it’s going to be a choice with consequences. It also means they’ve got a lot of power at this point,” she says. “They have power to reclaim some of the privacy from government intrusion that Roe once guaranteed, and that the court has just eviscerated.”

While much is written about the potential promise of quantum computers, “their simpler cousins — quantum sensors — are here now and improving at a rate that demands urgent attention,” writes Professor Chris Hoofnagle and a co-author. “Strategists must understand the new capabilities that quantum sensing will provide and start planning countermeasures today.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses John Eastman, whom he has publicly urged the State Bar of California to investigate because of his activities after the 2020 presidential election. Chemerinsky debated Eastman on a radio show for years but says his last appearance with him, in October 2020, still disturbed him more than a year later. “It was the first time I ever debated him where he wasn’t civil. I felt like I was debating Donald Trump,” he says.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses the overturning of Roe v. Wade and other recent Supreme Court decisions. “The reality is that Supreme Court decisions are always a product of the ideology of the justices,” he says. 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says said that while the right to travel, including to get an abortion, is protected, he expects conservative states will pass laws that try to prohibit women from leaving in order to get an abortion. “That should be unconstitutional, but we’ll see what the court does,” he says.

Professor Khiara M. Bridges talks about the racial dynamics of the fight over abortion, and how they shaped the events that led to the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade. 

“The decisions this week must be understood as a conservative majority favoring conservative political ideology: requiring aid for religious instruction, greatly expanding gun rights, ending abortion rights,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says. “It is not about judicial philosophy or constitutional interpretation. It is about conservatives moving constitutional law very far and very fast in a very conservative direction.”

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade presents an imperative for California to “be on the offensive” but putting additional money and effort into ensuring its residents, and those coming from the outside to receive care, can access contraceptives and abortion services. “When you have a law that makes abortion unavailable, you have a law that makes unavailable a service upon which Black people disproportionately rely, so there’s a specific racial impact,” she says, noting that Black people have not only higher rates of unintended pregnancy but also higher rates of maternal mortality and morbidity.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision allowing many states to end or sharply curtail abortion rights will have profoundly harmful effects on those who are forced to continue unwanted pregnancies and on democracy itself, says Berkeley Law scholar.

Key research by Berkeley Law’s Death Penalty Clinic is helping courts and state legislatures tackle racial discrimination in jury selection across the country.

“There’s an open legal question about whether states could limit the use of mifepristone in light of the FDA’s judgment that the medicine is safe and effective. It’s not at all clear,” Professor Khiara M. Bridges says. “States can regulate the practice of medicine within their borders.”

Professor Rebecca Wexler discusses the role of big tech in a post-Roe world, and why the fight over sensitive data will be of essence to protect patients. 

The Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade decision raises a host of thorny legal issues for pregnant people, healthcare providers, and state governments, Professor Khiara M. Bridges says. “We are going to see an abundance of lawsuits for the next 10 years, if not longer, around what states can and cannot do to regulate abortion,” she says. “It’s complicated. There aren’t easy answers, and there’s a lot of uncertainty.”

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says the Supreme Court’s recent decisions have sent a message to conservative state lawmakers that it won’t stand in the way of laws restricting birth control methods. “It’s all of the implications of the Dobbs decision that make us reasonable to be fearful about the accessibility of contraception in the future,” she says. 

“Precedent and the principle of stare decisis are supposed to limit judicial discretion and provide stability to the law. But time and again, as in this decision, the conservative justices are willing to overrule the precedents they dislike,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes. “They are motivated by carrying out the Republican platform, not a judicial philosophy or an interpretative methodology. The only question is how far they will go.”

California’s strict gun laws could be affected by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling striking down a New York law. The new test outlined in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen case “potentially has long-term implications for California’s other gun laws,” California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo says. 

One reason the case is so important to airlines is that they are likely to get a more pro-business outcome in the Supreme Court than with California’s lawmakers, Professor Catherine Fisk says. “The usual way of dealing with a policy disagreement is to get the legislature to enact a law,” she says. “What’s significant here is apparently the airlines couldn’t persuade the California legislature.”

Even before Roe was decided in 1973, the California Supreme Court held in 1969 that women have a fundamental right to choose whether to have children based on a right of privacy or liberty in matters related to marriage, family and sex. “The court did this interpreting ‘liberty’ in the California Constitution, just as the U.S. Supreme Court did four years later in Roe vs. Wade,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says. 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky calls the Supreme Court’s ruling that a New York gun-control law is unconstitutional “by far, the most expansive reading of the Second Amendment in American history,” and that it will put a vast number of laws regulating firearms in jeopardy. “Striking down a century-old New York law and expanding gun rights is stunning judicial activism,” he writes.

In a 6-3 ruling in the Vega v. Tekoh case, the Supreme Court held the only remedy for a Miranda violation is to block the use in court of a suspect’s incriminating comments. Professor Charles Weisselberg says he fears the decision gives police an incentive to pressure people who refuse to talk. “There will be no penalty for violating Miranda in this way,” he says. “There will be zero incentive for officers to cease questioning.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes that the U.S. House committee hearings examining the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol has convinced him the U.S. Department of Justice should bring criminal charges against Trump. “I do not minimize the difficulty of prosecuting a former president or of fairly trying one. Nor do I underestimate the risks of doing so,” writes. “But the central tenet of the rule of law is that no one is above the law, not even the president of the United States.”

Professor David Oppenheimer, faculty director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality & Anti-Discrimination Law, says the lawsuit was the “largest verdict in an individual race discrimination in employment case.”

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo discusses SCA10, which Democratic state leaders are trying to get on to the November ballot to codify abortion rights in the state. “If courts are interpreting away abortion rights at the federal level, there is the same risk a California court could interpret away California abortion rights, because SCA10 doesn’t specify what they are,” Carrillo said.

Professor Catherine Fisk says “illustrates how the companies get all the benefits of wage and price control that they would have if drivers were employees while none of the responsibility.”

 The U.S. Supreme Court “is basically cutting the establishment clause out of the Constitution,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes about the court’s holding that the state of Maine is constitutionally required to subsidize religious education when it pays for private secular education.

“Secession is clearly unconstitutional. There’s a reason the pledge of allegiance refers to ‘one nation, indivisible’,” Professor Daniel Farber says. “That’s as much true now as it was in 1865 when the South (including Texas) lost the Civil War, or 1868 when the 14th Amendment guaranteed all Americans the rights of citizenship.”

Having grown up in a poor area near the Florida-Alabama border, Bradley is relishing the chance to give back to his community.

Professor Frank Partnoy discusses why he helped start the nonpartisan, nonprofit International Institute of Law and Finance, which promotes academic research with an eye on influencing government agency rulemaking. “There’s a gap in terms of academics connecting with policymakers,” he says. 

International Human Rights Clinic Co-Director Roxanna Altholz discusses the sentencing of energy executive Roberto David Castillo in Honduras for arranging the 2016 murder of environmental activist Berta Cáceres. 

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and a co-author analyze why the Supreme Court of California has such a high rate of unanimous decisions, concluding that the court’s culture of consensus-building is largely responsible. 

Paying forward the benefits of their own Berkeley Law experience, graduates’ support helps to train top lawyers, generate leading scholarship, and uphold the school’s public mission.

Professor Khiara M. Bridges and NPR reporter Sarah McCammon answer listener questions about what a post Roe v. Wade world might look like. 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes that Republicans are using the Second Amendment as “a false fig leaf” to avoid backing new gun regulations. The U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear, he says, that the right to bear arms enshrined in the Constitution does not preclude many needed reforms. 

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and two co-authors  track the evolution of California’s abortion law in light of the impending decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. 

The Rhode Island senator joined Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and fellow Democratic Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Richard Blumenthal on an amicus brief in the West Virginia v. EPA case, which could limit the government’s ability to lower emissions at power plants. 

IHRLC co-directors Roxanna Altholz and Laurel E. Fletcher and clinical students help the Fundación Para la Justicia file a criminal complaint against the Mexican attorney general’s office for illegal surveillance, among other assistance.

Lecturer Shanin Specter says a proposal to allow the state legislature to write laws allowing lawmakers to decide the venue for civil lawsuits would increase tension between the legislative and judicial branches. “That is troubling because it seeks to upset the delicate balance among our three branches of government,” he says.  

Companies often push or ignore the boundaries about what they can tell staff, since the National Labor Relations Board has no power to punish them, Professor Catherine Fisk says. “They’ll spend a few million dollars litigating it, but that’s less than the millions more they presumably think they’ll have to pay if they were unionized.”

With California already behind on its climate goals, the state’s pending decision on whether to list the iconic western Joshua tree as a threatened species could imperil progress further, by making it impossible to build large-scale solar projects in the state’s vast deserts, writes Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. 

An eight-month investigation by The Associated Press in partnership with the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and its Investigative Reporting Program reveals a shadow industry that’s profiting off the Biden administration’s decision to send more than 25,000 Haitians attempting to immigrate into the U.S. back to Haiti, rather than to the South American countries where many had been living.

A sizzling spring events lineup is capped with a new on-demand CLE system. 

Professor Jonathan Simon discusses how to interpret the results alongside the successful recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. “I think the constituency for people who really think that the criminal legal system needs a deep reform may in fact be deeper in the East Bay,” he says. 

Kyra Morris ’23, co-leader of the student-led Gun Violence Prevention Project, or GVPP, lost her brother to gun violence in 2014. She calls Newsom’s program a step in the right direction. “Gun violence is a problem that needs to be addressed with all hands on deck,” she says. “We cannot look away from this issue at the state, local, and national levels.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Dennis Aftergut of Lawyers Defending American Democracy argue the U.S. Supreme Court’s originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment “is robbing us of our safety and our children” as an obstacle to sensible gun control legislation. 

Lecturer Shanin Specter discusses the challenges of recruiting paraprofessionals as firms like his expand their practice areas. “It seems that the number of folks going into that area is decreasing or stagnant and it’s a significant need,” he says.

Navigating a new regulatory frontier, Patel works with everyone from growers to licensing agencies, dispensary owners to police officers, nonprofit leaders to city administrators.

The work of Ethan Elkind, director of the  climate program and the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, on rail transit is cited in this podcast about where the political left is now and what happens next. 

As demand for battery-powered vehicles increases, “we’re just pretty far behind here,” says Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. “But I think we can get things moving, now that there’s bipartisan support for it.”

In a new decision this week, the U.S. Supreme Court court has made it virtually impossible for those whose rights are violated by federal officials to sue, no matter how egregious the constitutional violation or the injury, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes.

The event, hosted by the Berkeley Center for Law and Business, aimed to explore the frontiers of the high-end art world. 

Berkeley Law’s influential professors deliver a wide swath of meaningful scholarship that charts new terrain, probes vital issues, and provides revealing insights.

Some of the president’s ideas, such as raising the age to own a gun nationwide, could be problematic, Yoo says, adding gun laws might be better left up to individual states in the wake of several recent mass shootings. 

“My sense is that now, more than ever, our country and our world are going to need lawyers to uphold the rule of law and ensure justice,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, telling this year’s graduates to be inspired, not discouraged, by their experience over the past few years. 

Desirée Nguyen Orth, director of the Consumer Justice Program at East Bay Community Law Center, says the Biden administration’s announcement is a step in the right direction. 

Weighing in along with other legal experts, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says “a program to help homeless trans individuals would be allowed so long as it is a reasonable way to achieve a legitimate government objective.” 

Kristin Theis-Alvarez, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, discusses Berkeley Law’s plan to waive tuition and student service fees for in-state residents who belong to a federally recognized tribe

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky predicts we are on the verge of a dramatic change in so many areas of constitutional law and likens this era to the ideological shift the court underwent in 1937, after then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to “pack” the court with additional justices in response to opinions stifling his agenda

Professor Catherine Fisk discusses the Supreme Court’s efforts to force clerks to hand over their phone records and suggests the clerks respond as a group and decline to act until they consult with counsel

Professor Rebecca Wexler, with U Chicago Law’s Professor Aziz Huq, writes, in an era of medication abortion and remote medicine, states’ ability to clamp down on abortion access turns partly on their ability to identify who is seeking such care. Tech companies can make that harder, or easier.

Sewit Beraki, Brandon Dailey, and Kavya Dasari finish atop 50 teams at The Negotiation Challenge, a prestigious annual event for top law and business schools worldwide.

Lecturer Mallika Kaur interviews Nancy Lemon, Herma Hill Kay Lecturer, about her extensive experience in a practice area most attorneys agree is emotionally draining and personally trying

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, with federal law clerk Andrew Chemerinsky, writes the law is clear: The social media companies cannot be punished for being the sites where racist speech was expressed by a deeply disturbed and violent individual

Professor Frank Partnoy’s 2012 interview with the New York Times exploring the moral responsibility we have to care for future generations, is cited

Four Berkeley Law professors, including Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, discuss the court’s anticipated conservative decisions on some of America’s most divisive issues.

Matthew Stanford, California Constitution Center Senior Research Fellow, explains why only time will tell if the court is in fact prepared to lift its thumb entirely from the pro-arbitration scale

This year’s award recipients stand out among extraordinary individual and collective commitment across the legal landscape to improve people’s lives.

Across the country and around the world, our graduates are steering firms through some of the most turbulent waters in decades.

Professor Adam Badawi says Elon Musk would need to prove the true number of bots and the amount Twitter disclosed in its SEC filings rises to the level of a ‘material adverse effect’ in order for him to renege on his offer

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade could have implications for other reproductive rights such as contraception and IVF

Berkeley Law announces it will cover all tuition for current and future students who are both California residents and members of federally registered tribes

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, with Andrew Chemerinsky, writes it is urgent that the Supreme Court justices block Texas HB 20 from going into effect and declare it unconstitutional

Professor Catherine Fisk, Faculty Director of the Center for Law & Work, addresses employee privacy concerns as a growing number of tech companies extend abortion-related travel benefits

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, says open source information can be invaluable at the preliminary investigation stage, as you’re planning either humanitarian relief or to conduct a legal investigation

Samuelson Clinic student Jennifer Sun ’23 and supervising attorney Megan Graham argue for more public access to surveillance records requests in Minnesota federal court.

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says in its initial filing, the plaintiffs in Dobbs were testing how far the Supreme Court would go to disregard the viability line

Alexa Koenig, executive director of the Human Rights Center, says there’s been a shift in how tech companies are responding to events such as the Buffalo shooting

The law school will cover the Professional Degree Supplemental Tuition, which makes up the bulk of a student’s cost, for eligible students using existing financial aid dollars.

Professor Peter Menell, with Dennis Aftergut of Lawyers Defending American Democracy, writes Sen. Hawley appears ready not only to undo property and free speech rights, but also to bust a foundation of America’s international trade

Professor Khiara M. Bridges explains the obstacles to mail-ordered abortion medications and says she expects a conflict between a state’s ability to regulate the practice of medicine and the federal government’s ability to regulate the availability of any medication in the US.

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, appears on 60 Minutes to discuss open source investigations and says we are headed into an entirely new era of human rights investigations, and war crimes investigations, more generally

Dave Jones and Ted Lamm from the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment weigh in as investors campaign to require insurance companies to make stronger climate disclosures

Professor Dan Farber says the draft Dobbs opinion appears to go out of its way to decide issues that the justices don’t need to reach in order to resolve the case

Four high-ranking congressional Democrats sent formal requests to the CEOs of YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook’s parent company, Meta, on Thursday, asking them to archive content that could be used as evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine and citing a 2021 report from the Human Rights Center

Professor Orin Kerr explains why he believes there are reasons to think that birth control restrictionists will not succeed as abortion opponents have

Professor Khiara M. Bridges warns, if the Supreme Court is willing to do away with longstanding precedent like Roe, Bridges said, it’s impossible to predict what other rights also could be in question

David A. Carrillo, Executive Director of the California Constitution Center, and senior research fellow Allison G. Macbeth, explain how the reasoning in the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion in ‘Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization’ can also be applied to void other federal liberty protections such as contraception and interracial and same-sex marriage

Joshua Spivak, senior research fellow at the California Constitution Center, discusses the complex issues in play in the Chesa Boudin recall effort 

Students and colleagues hail the Berkeley Law professor, one of just five campus-wide winners this year, for his tireless preparation and passionate dedication. 

Lecturer Ann Ravel explains potentially illegal campaign finance issues with Maryland Rep Anthony Brown’s AG campaign

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says the announcement that preference for seating for the D.C. Bar Exam will be given to students from D.C.-area law schools is arbitrary, unfair and likely unconstitutional

Professor Orin Kerr discusses the confidentiality rules for Supreme Court clerks

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, discusses the increase in news using open source investigation techniques

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky suggests Chief Justice John Roberts no longer wields the moderating influence he once had over the court’s more hard-line conservatives

Professor Khiara M. Bridges explores the idea of the federal government leasing out federal lands and allow abortion clinics to operate on them

Dean Erwin Chemerinksy says the fact that a prominent Republican leader like McCarthy even discussed invoking Section 4, a political maneuver that has no historical precedence, was “stunning” in and of itself

Kristin Luker’s 1984 book, ‘Abortion & the Politics of Motherhood, is listed as one of the top 10 books on abortion to help people understand how we got to this point

Professor Khiara M. Bridges helps unpack the complicated question of what constitutes a burden

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says Justice Alito’s opinion, assuming it becomes the final decision, will put many rights in danger

A Berkeley Law student-led project details the legal mechanisms used by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s regime to exert increasing control over the arts.

Graduating with pro bono honors for her work with the Post-Conviction Advocacy Project, Garcia strives to understand the root causes of why people commit certain crimes.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky warns that if the Supreme Court overturns the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, the justices would likely begin “unraveling the whole fabric of constitutional protection of privacy”

Professor Khiara M. Bridges, one of the authors of an amicus brief in the Dobbs case, says the burden of restricted abortion access will fall heaviest on Black women and expects, if abortion is criminalized and states begin prosecuting people who terminate pregnancies, poor people of color will be arrested and convicted at higher rates than their white counterparts

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky points out that, from 1960 through 2021, Republicans have held the White House for 32 years and Democrats for 29, almost an even split, but Republicans have appointed 15 justices and Democrats only 9

Professor Dan Farber predicts that the Supreme Court’s dismissive attitude toward precedent in Roe v Wade is another signal of a conservative majority that’s eager to roll up its sleeves and “fix” all the issues in the law that conservatives have complained about for years

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky raises concerns that the investigation into the Supreme Court leak could be damaging to the high court

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explores whether the Supreme Court should be as transparent as counterparts in the other branches of the U.S. government.

Professor Khiara M. Bridges appears on the Majority Report to discuss the bombshell leaked US Supreme Court brief from Justice Alito that would overturn Roe V. Wade

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky appears on The Hill TV to discuss the Supreme Court’s apparent intention to overturn Roe v Wade

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says the anti-abortion movement has organized around Roe v Wade, but very few people have read it

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, discusses the use of satellite imagery to capture war crimes evidence

Professor Orin Kerr says we’ve had Supreme Court leaks before, but this is a whole new order of magnitude of leak

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says even without an explicit constitutional amendment, access to abortion in California would be unlikely to change unless a pre-emptive federal law is passed by Congress

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky examines the potential consequences of the Supreme Court’s apparent intention to overturn Roe v Wade

Oaklandside notes that Professor Khiara M. Bridges sounded the alarm in March over the impending loss of abortion protections, and how they would impact vulnerable people

Professor Orin Kerr’s tweets regarding the legal issues relating to the Supreme Court leak are cited

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky predicts that if Justice Alito’s reasoning from the leaked draft opinion is followed, then there is a large number of constitutional rights that are in jeopardy

Professor Orin Kerr says the leaking of the Supreme Court draft opinion is the most egregious violation of confidentiality for a staff member or employee of the court

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says a decision against abortion rights would come down hardest on people who do not have the ability or means to travel where an abortion would be available and the only source of optimism may be in the likelihood that the Supreme Court’s decision will sort of spur activism

David A. Carrillo, Executive Director of the California Constitution Center, says states like California “can use their constitutions to increase protections for reproductive liberty”

Berkeley Law professors Russell Robinson and Sonia Katyal weigh in on the rise of measures across the U.S. aimed at limiting these groups’ rights.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes the draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v Wade is right-wing Republican politics masquerading as law

Lecturer Shanin Specter says leaving the definition of individual rights to each of 50 jurisdictions will create the un-United States and predicts it is likely to get worse from here

Dean Erwin Chermerinsky questions whether the intense secrecy surrounding every aspect of the Supreme Court’s work is a good thing

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and NYU Professor Burt Neuborne write the core principle underlying the First Amendment is that government cannot punish speech because it disagrees with its viewpoint, but that is exactly what Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature have done to the Disney corporation for having dared to oppose legislation limiting discussion of gay issues in Florida’s public schools

Lecturer Mallika Kaur’s book Faith, Gender and Activism in the Punjab conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper is reviewed.

2Ls Julia Bennett, Elle Mahdavi, and Fatima Ladha won for best oral argument and best brief, and Bennett was named best oralist. 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky reflects on the LA riots and the anger that remains today because police excessive force, and racist policing continues

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, says it could take years to wade through all the war crimes evidence in Ukraine, it’s critically important to process it as soon as possible, to point investigators to the most important cases – and those that could lead to speedy prosecutions

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes federal Judge Mizelle’s misguided mask mandate decision is only the latest example of a bad practice that undermines orderly judicial processes and should be rejected by both sides of the partisan divide

Professor Jonathan Simon says, despite recall efforts, San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin has done the things he said he would do

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, says big corporations are perhaps not the ideal “poster child” for a cap-and-trade revenue recipient, they likely do deliver emission reductions

Professor Dan Farber says the Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling in West Virginia vs. EPA is likely to curtail not just EPA’s ability to combat climate change but the government’s ability to protect the public from other threats, from financial fraud to public health

Tijani leaned on the training and entrepreneurial spirit she gained at Berkeley Law in launching Firm for the Culture.

Professor Andrew Bradt says the results of the federal civil trial against opioid manufacturers underway in San Francisco will have ripple effects far beyond just the city

Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon says the Elon Musk/Twitter deal is a fairly standard merger agreement

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, claims that local agencies tend to poorly plan infrastructure work and don’t have enough capacity to manage megaprojects. They also often use procurement methods that create a management bottleneck.

Mridula Raman, Clinical Supervising Attorney at the Death Penalty Clinic, discusses the All Writs Act and if it can authorize prisoner transport in habeas proceedings

Savala Nolan, Executive Director of the Henderson Center for Social Justice, offers words of advice and wisdom to women of color, and other marginalized people, graduating law school

Lecturer Mallika Kaur’s book Faith, Gender and Activism in the Punjab conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper is reviewed.

Professor Seth Davis discusses Oklahoma v McGirt’s relevance for disputes about taxation and civil regulatory authority

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky appears on The Nation’s podcast and argues the Supreme Court has empowered the police and subverted civil rights

Atkinson says she’s thrilled to get the award, which recognizes an early-career academic who shares Ginsburg’s passion for justice.

Ten percent of the seller’s commission from the auction of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s personal mementos will go to to fellowships offered by the Women of Berkeley Law

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, says he believes mass rail transit will get the bulk of the ridership back to pre-pandemic levels.

A former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court wrote an op-ed urging the reexamination of the case of Toforest Johnson, a prisoner on Alabama’s death row long represented by the Death Penalty Clinic

A op-ed Dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote last summer regarding possible D.C. statehood is cited to answer a Washington Post reader’s question about the constitutionality of it

Professor Chuck Weisselberg explains his fears regarding the Supreme Court signaling it may shield police from civil lawsuits for failing to provide Miranda warnings to suspects, saying police could be given an incentive to pressure people who refuse to talk

Lecturer Mallika Kaur’s book Faith, Gender and Activism in the Punjab conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper is reviewed.

A recent celebration of 39 works that probe compelling issues across and beyond the legal landscape highlights the faculty’s far-reaching expertise. 

Professor Frank Partnoy, with fellow Robert Bishop, filed a comment letter regarding the SEC’s recent proposal to halve the deadline for large investors to disclose their stakes in companies

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, says that the challenge on convicting war crimes through social media images will be on the admissibility, on convincing judges this is something they should be allowing or heavily weighing

HRC’s Berkeley Protocol is being used by Ukrainian groups to determine how best to document and preserve evidence, as well as ethical and legal guidance for gathering eyewitness accounts

Students logged more than 28,000 collective pro bono hours last year, and about 95% of 1Ls have done pro bono work this year.

Obasogie says he is “thrilled and grateful” to be one of this year’s 180 recipients of the prestigious fellowship.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky expresses that creating meaningful checks and balances for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office is long overdue

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, appears on the Lawfare Podcast for an in-depth interview examining the history of using social media for international criminal cases and Berkeley/the HRC’s role in developing the Berkeley Protocol

Professor Robert Merges 2004 paper, A New Dynamism in the Public Domain, is mentioned in an article examining whether corporations are going to use IP law to profit from psychedelics

Professor David Oppenheimer discusses the Tesla racial discrimination case and says the judge wrote a very careful opinion that will make it hard for Tesla to appeal

Professor Catherine Crump, Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, filed suit on behalf of a coalition of immigrant rights groups seeking information from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement about the agency’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, a so- called alternative to detention program that has ballooned during the Biden administration

Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon explains the options the board at Twitter has in reaction to Elon Musk’s takeover offer

Professor Catherine Fisk says more needs to be done to protect gig workers and their families

Nilam Faqhir, Andrea Zachrich, and Miles Jasper, who was named Best Advocate, prevail at the annual event in New Orleans.

Lecturer Carla Shapreau, who has been working on the case of a Stradivarius violin stolen under the Nazis, is one of the thirty French and international speakers participating in the colloquium devoted to the spoliation of musical instruments in Europe, between 1933 and 1945

Professor Leti Volpp says clarifies a proposed bill would that would permit non-citizens who are authorized to work in the U.S. to become police officers in California

Professor Catherine Fisk explores the leverage workers and employers have when it comes to a return-to-the-office policy

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says the Supreme Court’s holding in Thompson v. Clark was narrow and the justices only ruled that malicious prosecution claims did not require an affirmative indication of actual innocence

Having fueled the resurgence of student activism in his native country, Yang relishes advancing his advocacy skills during his year in Berkeley.

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, explains the benefits and challenges of a large amount of social media evidence

Dean Erwin Chemerinksy say Justice Jackson is not going to change anybody’s mind with regard to the abortion issue or the gun issue, but she’s the first justice in history to have ever been a public defender, she’s the first Black woman to ever serve on the court, and these things could really influence others

Professor Khiara Bridges debunks Facebook posts claiming California lawmakers proposed a bill that would allow mothers to kill their babies up to 7 days after birth

Professor Orin Kerr explores how the reshuffled Supreme Court might rule on surveillance and policing

Professor Catherine Fisk explains the lack of coverage gig workers and their families have when people are killed on the job and the cost-saving measures companies like Uber take to exclude their drivers from workers’ compensation

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, discusses the increase in major warrants of arrest coming forward on the basis open source investigations and social media evidence

The Hollywood Reporter ranks Berkeley Law #4 on their Top Law Schools list, calling out of offerings in law and tech and our strength in intellectual property and privacy

Deputy director of Berkeley Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic, Campos-Bui is honored for her impactful work on the effects of criminal legal system fees and fines.

Lecturer Mallika Kaur writes, in order for the VAWA to truly positively affect everyone who has experienced gendered violence, it must openly examine the biases faced by minorities and provide support to grassroots initiatives

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says John Eastman’s actions went beyond that of an attorney

Lecturer David Rosenfeld predicts Amazon will do everything they can to avoid a contract with workers at a Staten Island warehouse who voted to unionize

Professor Khiara M. Bridges explains the personal impact of the implication, when President Biden announced his intention to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court, that there was no one qualified 

A three-part forum organized by law and public policy students highlighted some of the work needed to make change.

Professor Catherine Fisk, Faculty Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Work and the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, compares labor organizers at Amazon’s Staten Island facility to General Motors organizers in 1944

Professor Russell Robinson, Faculty Director, Center on Race, Sexuality & Culture, writes while Will Smith slapping Chris Rock will undoubtedly be the most talked about moment from the 2022 Oscars, there was another momentous occurrence at the awards show that not nearly enough people have recognized

Berkeley Law is #9 overall in the latest U.S. News rankings, with a whopping nine specialty areas in the top 10 — including three ranked #1.

Professor Pamela Samuelson is one of a dozen law professors who filed an amicus brief telling the Federal Circuit that a ‘dangerous’ split ruling from it to seal patent licensing information belonging to the private equity firm that is funding Uniloc’s legal war against Apple has flipped the legal system’s “presumption of access” in intellectual property cases

Lecturer Mallika Kaur’s book Faith, Gender and Activism in the Punjab conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper is reviewed.

Professor Orin Kerr says someone can protest government policy by expressing your opinion against it, but that expression doesn’t give you a right to damage someone else’s property

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, makes an appearance in State of the Bay to discuss the California Environmental Quality Act and Governor Newsom’s proposed gas rebate for Californians

HRC’s Lindsay Freeman, one of the authors of the Berkeley Protocol, discusses helping groups in Ukraine standardize their efforts and adapt and apply the protocol in this specific situation

Professor Katerina Linos and Professor Laura Fletcher weigh in on the powers and importance of how the ICC investigates war crimes allegations against Russia

Erwin Chemerinsky writes college campuses — particularly law schools — should be places where all ideas and views can be expressed

Arsen Kulyk and Dmytro Tymoshchenko, both experienced Ukrainian attorneys, are providing support for refugees and military operations.

LLM student Dmytro Tymoshchenko put his studies on hold due to the pandemic and is now living in Ukraine and volunteering with the civilian defense unit in Boryspil, about 20 miles outside of Kyiv

Professor Amanda Tyler discusses working alongside Ketanji Brown Jackson when they were both clerking at the Supreme Court

Wai Wai Nu, visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center, explains the meaning of the U.S. government defining the crimes perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya people as a genocide.

A report, “Systematic Suppression: Hungary’s Arts & Culture in Crisis,” by the Artistic Freedom Initiative, and created in partnership with Berkeley Law and Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, is highlighted

Professor Eric Stover, Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center, discusses the Berkeley Protocol on Open Source Investigations and why it’s important both for the press and for courts, that information is verified

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, made a guest appearance in Lost LA to discuss the rail lines in Los Angeles

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, with Dennis Aftergut, counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy, suggest the Supreme Court subject itself, for the first time, to a judicial code of conduct

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, discusses the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations and the long collaborative process of formalizing OSINT to be admissible in international courts.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky appears in the Climate One podcast to discuss West Virginia v. EPA case and how that can affect the authority of every federal agency

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses how upcoming hearings on President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee will provide an opportunity to help strengthen public confidence in the Supreme Court

Professor Charles Weisselberg says that senior citizens are “falling through the cracks” since the government agency have been undercounting the number of prisoners under its jurisdiction

Jeremy Fogel, Executive Director of Berkeley Judicial Institute, says Judge Laurence Silberman’s suggestion that student protesters at a Yale event should be identified and potentially disqualified from federal clerkships raises the question of “whether a sitting federal judge should comment on a politically charged situation because of the possible perception of bias”

Berkeley Law student Nahlee Lin plays a pivotal role in creating the new policy-driven repository.

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, writes that rail is slowly transforming key parts of Los Angeles once again back into a railtown

Lindsay Freeman, Law and Policy Director at the Human Rights Center, says that despite the good intentions of the volunteers helping authenticate images and videos of possible war crimes being committed in Ukraine, some may simply fall too far short of the burden of proof required to prosecute war crimes

Lecturer Shanin Specter is representing one of the families that did not sign on to that stipulation offered by Boeing and says that the families will be closely watching the Forkner trial because “they care deeply for accountability for the various wrongdoers”

Elena Chachko, Fellow at Miller Institute, says that sanctions allow you to feel like you’re taking action, but it “doesn’t necessarily accomplish what you want to accomplish in practical terms”

Rachel Zuraw, Director of LL.M. Professional Development, explains the value in activities outside the classroom.

Professor Andrea Roth cautions that, if DNA consent forms use overly broad language that says the DNA can be used by law enforcement, some courts may not agree it’s a Fourth Amendment violation to search it for an unrelated investigation

Professor Jennifer M. Urban, Director of Policy Initiatives at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, and chair of the California Privacy Protection Agency’s board, discusses the opportunity the agency has to protect privacy and  understand how that work interacts with all of the innovative technologies

Lecturer Ann Ravel says that Trump seems to have made the decision to run by claiming that he planned to be the 47th President instead of saying ‘if I run’  but is being careful to not officially announce that he is running so he can avoid filing a financial disclosure report

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky speaks on the new requirement that all graduating students must take at least one course on race and the law

Dual-degree program lets students get the best of both Berkeley Law and the prestigious Haas School of Business.

Lecturer Shanin Specter explains his theories on how the war in Ukraine can end

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at the Center for Law, Energy and Environment, and Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, discuss how the two nations in the US-China joint declaration have the resources to develop and scale up the technologies to solve the global reliance on fossil fuels

Actors and legal giants share the spotlight in a spirited performance of Romeo, Juliet, and the Case of Friar Laurence.

Ken Alex, Director of Project Climate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, shares research being undertaken as well as actions California and subnational governments are taking to drastically reduce short-lived climate pollutants—like methane—from key industry sectors within the next decade

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says the Supreme Court has said in numerous cases that freedom of travel is a fundamental right

Adam Sterling, Executive Director, Berkeley Center for Law and Business, explains why the tech billionaire community is in California 

Professor Jonathan Simon comments on the recent Bay area burglary tourism and says that narratives like that of the South American theft groups are “like catnip” for law enforcement

Victor Peskin, Senior Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center, explores the formidable obstacles that stand in the way of actually holding Russian President Putin and his inner circle to account for crimes perpetrated by Russian forces in Ukraine

Professor Peter Menell discusses Southwestern Law Professor Kevin Greene’s ideas on how to fix the structural racism in America’s copyright system 

One of the most prestigious roles for recent law school graduates, the fellowship offers extensive work on Supreme Court cases.

Professor Catherine Fisk says she sees esports as currently living through what Major League Baseball experienced 80 years ago with “exploitative contracts”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky testified at a California reparations task force meeting, suggesting providing reparations based on lineage, as opposed to race, would make the effort less likely to be overturned in court

Professor Khiara M. Bridges appears on the Berkeley Voices podcast to discuss the history of reproductive rights in the U.S., what’s at stake when Roe v. Wade is overturned and why we should expand our fight for reproductive justice

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, weighs in on the big role social media platforms have to play as activists, journalists, researchers and volunteers race to dig up damning photos and videos of Russia’s conduct in Ukraine

Professor Roxanna Altholz, co-director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic, discusses the murder of two men and a teen – all from the same town – whose bodies were found in Phoenix. The families believe human traffickers were behind the killings.

Dean Erwin Chemerinksy writes U.S. Supreme Court could make a significant ruling on the EPA’s authority to fight climate change—or not

The California Constitution Center’s Dan Bromberg and Brandon V. Stracener write, if protests like the Canadian truckers’ protests came to California, declaring a Canada-style emergency and exercising similar powers is not an option for Governor Gavin Newsom

Professor Amanda Tyler reflects on her time a a Supreme Court clerk with SCOTUS nominee Judge Katanji Brown Jackson

The Human Rights Center’s Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations, the most comprehensive framework for digital evidence collection and preservation for use in international tribunals, is being used to ensure digital evidence is properly collected and stored

Dean Erwin Chemerinksy says that he believes that the investigation of John Eastman is appropriate and necessary because Eastman was the architect of an attempted coup

With Russia ratcheting the nuclear tension to the breaking point, can the international community find an off-ramp for Vladimir Putin?

Professor Robert Bartlett says that MayStreet’s Analytics Workbench allowed for documentation of the vital importance of odd lot quotes in today’s equity markets, especially for higher-priced stocks

Dean Erwin Chemerinksy says he does not think any attorney should be disciplined for protected free speech, but John Eastman’s actions went far beyond the type of speech that advocates for a position

Lecturer Tess Bridgeman says that by tech companies taking action against Russian disinformation, it will allow more accurate reporting of the invasion to be seen by a wider audience

The annual Stefan A. Riesenfeld Symposium honored Margrethe Vestager, who discussed proposals to safeguard competition and user safety. 

Professor Amanda Tyler, who was a Supreme Court clerk with Judge Katanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s choice to replace Justice Breyer, says she is meticulous in her approach to the law

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky applauds President Biden’s choice of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court and says, in the world of law, credentials don’t get better than hers

Professor Jonathan Simon says the passage of Stand Your Ground laws were a big cultural shift

Professor Holly Doremus and UC Davis Professor Rick Frank offer recommendations for revising California’s antiquated water laws

Professor Andrea Roth discusses the controversial case involving SFPD use of DNA evidence from a rape kit to link the victim to another crime

Lecturer Shanin Specter filed a lawsuit on behalf of a passenger of Ethiopian Air Flight 302, which crashed in 2019, and wants to add Boeing executives as defendants, saying “none of them has been held accountable”

Professor Jonathan Simon explains the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities that are vulnerable to violence

Rebecca Golbert, Executive Director of the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, writes about her personal grief over the situation in Ukraine

A new radio show about Texas’ abortion law strengthens the ties between the Human Rights Center and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Research and reporting from an innovative collaboration between the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law and the Investigative Reporting Program at Berkeley Journalism resulted in this podcast from Reveal exploring how Texas has gone after Roe v. Wade 

A Sacramento Bee editorial suggesting President Biden select Judge Leondra Kruger for the Supreme Court cites a recent study of her record from the California Constitution Center

Professor Orin Kerr discusses the conundrum for the Supreme Court concerning Justice Thomas’ wife’s political actions and says that, while there are no clear-cut rules outlining when justices need to recuse themselves, there are appearance concerns

“This requirement sends an important message about our school’s commitment to equality and justice,” says Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says that “John Eastman’s memo outlined how to accomplish a coup”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky expresses that if the lower court ruling is allowed to stand, judges would be given extensive power to micromanage enrollment at every public school in California

Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute, says that by adding solar panel canopies over some of the utility’s Ceres Main Canal “you’re taking something that’s already been altered by human activity and doubling up on the benefits it provides”

David A. Carrillo, Executive Director of the California Constitution Center, describes Justice Leondra Kruger as a median justice based on the fact she has taken an even distribution of liberal and conservative positions

Professor Ian Haney Lopez appears on the Daily Kos podcast to discuss the Race-Class narrative and says that we need to build cross-racial and cross-class solidarity

Professor Ian Haney Lopez comments on the Race-Class narrative and says that we need to build cross-racial and cross-class solidarity

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky comments on the White House’s new environmental colorblind strategy and says that the Supreme Court is very hostile to any attempt to use race as a basis for giving benefits

Professor Jonathan Simon comments on recent overhaul of the agreement that made the District Attorney’s Office the lead investigator into potential officer brutality and says that he doesn’t see a record of failure or betrayal by the District Attorney’s Office that is extreme enough to justify “tearing up the whole document, rather than asking for specific changes”

Lecturer Mallika Kaur highlights the life of Justice Ajit Singh Bains, one of India’s finest jurists and human rights defenders, who recently passed away

Louise Bedsworth, Director of the Land Use Program at the Center for Law Energy & the Environment and senior advisor to the California China Climate Institute, discusses what steps California has taken to help halt climate change which will make life better for Californians, but also create a model for the rest of the world.

Professor Holly Doremus comments that the current blueprint for updating California’s system of water laws is meant to move the system in the right direction

Lecturer Shanin Specter says that about 100 citizens of the area right around the Braun plant in Allentown have developed cancer

Ignoring conventional wisdom a smart move for Class of 2013 trio now running their own firm.

Ken Alex, Director of Project Climate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, said it is encouraging to see two of the world’s largest ports, Los Angeles and Shanghai, work collaboratively to accelerate the transition to zero-emission fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Professor Amanda Tyler says the Supreme Court’s order in an Alabama voting rights case sanctions – at least in the short term during a very important election cycle — what appears to be egregious vote dilution rulings 

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment’s Climate Project, discusses Joe Biden’s  guidelines for how states should spend $5 billion in new infrastructure and says fast charges are key

Professor Frank Zimring says that the number of fatal shootings is unsurprising and that policy enacted now may take years to make a statistically significant difference

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, talks to BBC Radio about open-source investigators’ work to find the truth behind news events

Director of Equity and Inclusion, Student Services Emily Bruce secured funding for additional training to increase the school’s mindfulness offerings.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky suggests that President Biden pick a Supreme Court Justice who might put together coalitions for progressive results

Professor Amanda Tyler appears on MSNBC’s The Last word to examine the qualifications of President Biden’s potential nominees to the Supreme Court

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says the Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday to reinstate a congressional district map drawn by the Alabama Legislature serves as an effort by the conservative justices to help Republicans in the midterms

Professor Emeritus Daniel Rubinfeld predicts the Frontier/Spirit airline merger will go through, despite antitrust concerns

Professor Catherine Fisk discusses a potential racial harassment suit against Tesla

Savala Nolan, Executive Director of the Henderson Center for Social Justice, writes that very often, white people and their efforts disappoint her and says if we want cooperative, connective transformation it’s time to increase the heat

A 2016 report by the East Bay Community Law Center that found Black drivers in San Francisco accounted for “48.7% of arrests for a ‘failure to appear/pay’ traffic court warrant,” despite making up just under 6% of the population at the time

Professor Amanda Tyler discusses the reasons Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would be an excellent Supreme Court Justice

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says California Supreme Court Justice Kruger is brilliant and has impeccable credentials as a potential Supreme Court candidate.

Professor Tejas Narechania explains a new act, passed by the FCC that will require broadband companies  provide easy-to-read information about their services to improve transparency

David A. Carrillo, Executive Director of the California Constitution Center, says the California Supreme Court’s ability to reach consensus is its “superpower”

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and Senior Research Fellow Brandon V. Stracener explore the judicial record of California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger based on an analysis by the California Constitution Center of every opinion and vote by Kruger in her time on California’s high court

Faculty member Henry Hecht uses a pragmatic approach — and a strong network with Berkeley Law grads — to help students maximize their skills.

Judge Jeremy Fogel, Executive Director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, discusses California Supreme Court Justice Kruger as a potential Supreme Court candidate and says she is an independent thinker 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is one of 16 law professors who have filed amicus briefs supporting dismissal of a controversial bankruptcy case involving thousands of talcum powder lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson and says there are “serious constitutional issues”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains the reasons why Justice Breyer is a model for all who sit on a judicial bench

Lecturer Shanin Specter says he is optimistic that judges are listening to calls for changes to common benefit fees and judicial management will modify by streamlining the MDL process

A recent brief authored by Professor Catherine Fisk and 3L Amy Reavis observes that powerful global corporations like McDonald’s control the prices, quality, hours, and other operations, and the franchisee has no way to increase profits other than cutting labor costs

Judge Jeremy Fogel, Executive Director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, explains the impact Covid-related stress has had on judges

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says Justice Kruger has stellar credentials and would add diversity to the court, not only as a Black woman but as a state supreme court justice and someone from the West Coast

Professor Catherine Crump, Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, notes the ACLU’s decision to use tracking technology was made by the ACLU’s fundraising and advocacy team, not its legal department, which often does not work in tandem

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says recent free speech controversies at law schools reflect the times we are living in

Renowned panelists, including former Fox News hosts Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky, offer guidance for litigators, advisors, investigators, and HR professionals.

Professor Tejas Narechania joins the Strict Scrutiny podcast for a retrospective on Justice Breyer

Professor Daniel Farber says that the new justice should be able to work with other justices on the court but also have the ability to write strong dissents and appeal to the public sense of what the court has done

Professor Frank Partnoy says synthetic shares can exist because the same shares are often lent out to multiple short sellers at once, creating the impression that there are more shares than there really are

Professor Sonia Katyal, published in June in the Georgetown Law Journal, is cited for explaining that corporate and government actors have pushed to transform the law of trade secrecy into one of the most — if not the most — powerful tools to ensure concealment of information

Lecturer Ann Ravel says former president Trump is already getting close to the blurry line between candidate and non-candidate

Professor Tejas Narechania says Justice Breyer brings a level of sophistication and engagement to the Supreme Court’s intellectual property cases that will be missed

Professor Andrew Bradt says it’s unlikely that a federal rules committee is going to make major changes to common benefit fees in multidistrict litigation

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains the hurdles to getting the ERA ratified as a constitutional amendment 

Professor Daniel Farber comments that Justice Stephen Breyer’s  “contribution has taken the form of low-key concurrences and dissents” in the subject of environmental law

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer

Professor Amanda Tyler discusses speculation that California Supreme Court Associate Justice Leondra Kruger could be the nominee to replace Justice Stephen Breyer.

Professor Claudia Polsky, Director of the Environmental Law Clinic, comments on the clinic’s work to address toxic PFAS chemicals in America’s drinking water, describing them as “equal opportunity poisons.” 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky speaks to Justice Stephen Breyer’s legacy

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says California Supreme Court Associate Justice Leondra Kruger has had a stellar career and would be easily confirmable as a Supreme Court Justice

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky comments that there are times when the stewards of our system, like Justice Breyer, must put the good of an institution they love, and of the country they love, above their own interests 

Professor Kenneth Ayotte is one of a group of bankruptcy law professors weigh in on Johnson & Johnson’s use of the bankruptcy system to settle lawsuits alleging that its talc products cause cancer, calling the strategy a “serious abuse” and accused J&J of attempting to “deprive innocent talc victims of their day in court.

Professor Chris Hoofnagle, Faculty Director at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, discusses that in quantum computing, one of the greatest risks of a short-term failure scenario is whether we are willing to recognize it

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky was named the most influential person in American legal education by National Jurist

An under-the-radar Berkeley Law division plays a crucial role in California’s decennial process.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses two cases about affirmative action involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina and says that the removal of the affirmative action program would allow the effects of historic discrimination in admissions

Professor Khiara M. Bridges appears on the GOOP podcast in which she explains that the Supreme Court could potentially overturn Roe v. Wade and what this decision could mean for women’s constitutional rights

Adam Sterling, Executive Director, Berkeley Center for Law and Business, says the “in-house counsel” tag implies “outsider” status

Lecturer Mallika Kaur comments that immigration attorneys continue advocating for traumatized clients while juggling challenges of a system that is often re-traumatizing

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment’s Climate Project, was featured on ABC 10 San Diego discussing CLEE’s rail transit report, Getting Back on Track

Professor Pamela Samuelson, with Harvard’s Rebecca Tushnet, filed an amicus brief in Green et al. v. U.S. DOJ arguing that the provisions “disregard and override traditional mechanisms within the Copyright Act that struck the balance between copyright protection and First Amendment interests

Professor Kenneth Ayotte says the private equity consortium that controlled Warrior Met’s finances had a clear interest in a fast bankruptcy process that would largely benefit their own bottom lines, not the interests of the workers

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, discusses a new CLEE report that found San Diego’s nearly $2.2-billion Blue Line trolley extension cost taxpayers double the national average per mile for light-rail projects

Kristin Theis-Alvarez, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, says that she believes that Latino students find Berkeley Law to be a place that shares their commitment to tackling the complex challenges facing their communities

Professor Laurel Fletcher discusses that oppressive governments are criminalizing human rights activism by adopting cyberlaws that align with European standards which allow them to restrict legitimate online expression

Professor Catherine Fisk discusses how in an effort to support and protect essential workers and small businesses, California has introduced the FAST Recovery Act which ensures shared responsibility between franchisors and franchisees for legal compliance 

Kerr, who studies computer crime, criminal procedure, and criminal law, is the school’s newest faculty chairholder. 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes that, despite students becoming more dispirited and losing faith in the Supreme Court, they are reminded that there have been other bleak times in constitutional law, and suggests they direct their focus on other avenues for change

Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky takes center stage with actors, opposing counsel, and a judge in a unique Shakespeare production.

Professor Daniel Farber says that any bold actions like a vaccine-or-test mandate or climate change policies through agencies is going to have tough sledding in the Supreme Court

Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy comments that the California’s Employment Development Department’s clawback program is creating debt for some Californians who cannot prove they are working or seeking work, which can further push Californians into poverty

Senator Manchin’s claims about the filibuster are debunked by a 1997 Stanford Law Review article by Professor Catherine Fisk and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky examining the history of the filibuster 

Professor Katerina Linos appears on the GovExec Daily podcast to discuss how to make customer service more effective in government in a very low-tech way

Professor Jonathan Simon suggests recent highway shootings are likely either road rage assaults or calculated attacks against a motorist who the perpetrator already knew – both of which could be aggravated by the growing number of people who are armed

Berkeley Law’s dean says the theme for his one-year term — how law schools can make a difference — is driven by the urgency of society’s problems.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky reflects on the last five years, looks ahead to his next term as dean and discusses the future of legal education 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses his theme for his AALS presidency : “How Law Schools Can Make a Difference”

Lecturer Rose Carmen Goldberg explores the alarming decrease in accessibility of hospice care despite the increase in death and awareness of the importance of end-of-life care during the pandemic

Professor Catherine Crump, Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, arguing before the Second Circuit on behalf of the plaintiffs in Knight First Amendment Institute v. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, said that the Trump Administration’s alleged “ideological screening” of immigrants and refugees at the border included questions that were too widely asked and general 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is appointed for another 5 year term

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says Peter Navarro’s assertion that the “Green Bay Sweep” was lawful is nonsense and would have been an unconstitutional, illegal coup

In his four-plus years, Berkeley Law has expanded its financial aid, faculty ranks, clinical offerings, student diversity, and expenditures for students pursuing public interest careers.

The school is the first academic partner of the ESG and Law Institute, launched by the Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison firm. 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes the Biden administration’s vaccination mandates are clearly legal, but the politicization of the pandemic and vaccines makes it doubtful whether the Supreme Court will uphold them

Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon, with Berkeley Professor Mark Brilliant, writes there’s a forgotten liberal solution to the school system issues highlighted by the pandemic: vouchers 

Mark Cohen, senior fellow and director of the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, says political inertia and questions over how to better address US tech security and Chinese intellectual property theft are hurdles to fixing or shutting down the China Initiative

The Samuelson Clinic’s Megan Graham has trained more than 1,000 public defenders in three years on how to litigate cutting-edge technology issues.

Four Berkeley Law students detail their memorable experience and how it shaped their career  trajectory. 

Lecturer Shanin Specter secured a big-ticket verdict in 2021 – a $9.7 million for a man who sustained neurological damage from a mistake during brain surgery

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and Senior Research Fellow Stephen M. Duvernay explain that California cities have no power to become breakaway republics, and Oroville’s stunt to become a “constitutional republic city” because of unhappiness with the ongoing state of emergency due to the coronavirus pandemic is not a thing

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at the Center for Law, Energy and Environment, explains the hurdles to building food waste recycling plants, a key part of a law taking effect in January that will require municipalities across the state to collect food waste for its potential use in making renewable natural gas for electricity

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes meaningful police oversight will need to come from the political process, from Congress and from state and local governments, rather than from the Supreme Court

“Eleanor is precisely the type of life-long evidence scholar, teacher, mentor, and role model who is deserving of the Wigmore Award,” one nomination reads. 

Professor Elisabeth Semel, Director of the Death Penalty Clinic, explains that racial discrimination in jury selection is a nationwide issue and says reforming peremptory strikes is only part of the fight 

Professor Khiara M. Bridges shoots down the right’s attempts to portray abortion as a “career choice” explains what is really at stake for women

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains why he thinks the Supreme Court should be expanded and says while it’s true increasing the size of the court might affect its legitimacy, we’re already there

Lecturer Mallika Kaur writes, after a year of unprecedented protests, farmers and agrarian laborers in India have won an unprecedented victory and are now poised to change the whole game

Professor Khiara M. Bridges appears on the BBC’s Americast podcast to discuss Governor Newsom’s plan to use Texas SB8’s framework for gun control and why she believes it is more than just a PR stunt

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Khiara M. Bridges discuss Texas’ SB8 and Governor Newsom’s plan to use it as a framework to address gun violence 

Professor Catherine Fisk comments on the liability of Uber in the shooting death of a driver in San Francisco under Prop 22, which has been deemed unconstitutional, but remains in effect

The school’s 95.4% pass rate among first-time takers is the highest mark of any law school in California. 

Mark Cohen, senior fellow and director of the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, says, in the federal ‘China Initiative’ case of Harvard nanotechnologist Charles Lieber, the government is settling for charges that have little to do with technology

Professor Khiara M. Bridges appears on KQED’s Forum to discuss whether Governor Newsom’s plan to use Texas’ SB8 as a framework to address gun violence is legally viable and politically astute

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Khiara M. Bridges explain the differences between Texas’ SB8 and Governor Newsom’s plan to use it as a framework to address gun violence 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Texas abortion case and Governor Newsom’s announcement of a bill that would allow people to sue the makers and sellers of assault weapons

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Khiara M. Bridges discuss the Supreme Court’s decision on Texas’ abortion law and say it subverts the constitutional guarantee that all citizens have the same rights, no matter where they live 

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says Governor Newsom’s pledge to pass a law restricting assault weapons through private litigation is exactly the kind of legal gambit that constitutional scholars have predicted since the Supreme Court majority declined to block the Texas abortion law

Professor Roxanna Altholz, co-director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic, says the United States’ failure to respond to evidence presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights regarding the 2010 killing of Anastasio Hernández Rojas at the hands of U.S. border agents, goes against the president’s campaign commitment that immigration agents “abide by professional standards and are held accountable for inhumane treatment”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses the Supreme Court’s decision to not block Texas law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy which goes against Roe v Wade

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says the Supreme Court ruling in the Texas abortion case has given Texas a roadmap for blocking lawsuits

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky appears on the National Constitution Center’s podcast We the People to discuss the history of religious schooling and public funding in America under the Constitution, including from the founding onward; what historical precedent means for how to understand and interpret the religious freedom clauses of the First Amendment; and how the Court might rule in the case

Matthew Stanford and Brandon V. Stracener, California Constitution Center Senior Research Fellows, explain why it’s time to abandon monitoring software and the traditional closed-book bar examination model itself 

The 90-second episodes of the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment’s show aim to break people out of the doom-and-gloom loop on climate change.

Lecturer Jim Dempsey joined the Bar Association of San Francisco virtual panel discussing the California Privacy Rights Act

The Berkeley Law Opportunity Scholarship program is highlighted as a resource for first-generation students

Professor Jonathan Simon says that crime concerns in L.A. can slow progressive criminal justice reforms, but it won’t derail the reform movement

Professor Jonathan Simon says that due to businesses trying to maximize profits by reducing the number of people working there, the automated self check-outs enable theft

Professor Catherine Fisk, in light of the recent hacking of Planned Parenthood, inputs that although some women might be worried about their jobs, there are laws that protect employees from retaliation for engaging in lawful off-duty behavior

Professor Orin Kerr appears in The Lawfare Podcast to discuss about the merits of Apple’s lawsuit and its implications for the spyware industry and cybersecurity norms 

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says that critical race theory conflated ideas like diversity, equity and inclusion efforts or teacher training meant to raise awareness of why students might face different circumstances

Professor Roxanna Altholz, co-director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic, says that by the United States not responding by the set deadline in the international human rights case involving the killing of Anastasio Hernández Rojas, it gives authoritarian regimes in the Americas permission to do the same

Professor Frank Zimring says that legally limiting the capacity of a magazine is marching pretty far from the core meaning of individual self-defense

Professor David Oppenheimer, Director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law,  comments on the Activision Blizzard Inc. and Monster Beverage Corp. case and says California courts will likely uphold the gender mandate since these laws have become commonplace in much of the world

A Berkeley Law graduate, professor, and two students team up to help a domestic violence victim and improve California law. 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is the most important abortion case to come before the Supreme Court in almost three decades

Remelisa Moraleda, president of the University of Northeastern Philippines and its law school dean, calls Berkeley “the best place to be.” 

Judge Jeremy Fogel, Executive Director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, discusses the future of virtual courtrooms and how law schools need to be preparing graduates for this “new normal” of courtroom proceedings.

Judge Jeremy Fogel, Executive Director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, talks about the future of virtual courtrooms and how law schools need to be preparing graduates for this “new normal” of courtroom proceedings

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, explains why U.S. construction projects are harder to get done and says the costs are higher than those in Western Europe and democratic nations in Asia

Professor Jonathan Gould argues the standard case against filibuster reform misses an important asymmetry between the two major political parties

Professor Roxanna Altholz, co-director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic, discusses the landmark ruling against paramilitary violence in Columbia and her years long effort to to have the testimonies of the families of victims included in U.S. criminal proceedings against the Colombian paramilitary leaders

Journalist Khwaga Ghani is the first fellow in an ambitious program to support Afghan refugees, co-sponsored by Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center.

Professor Andrea Roth says genetic genealogy can be an effective tool for the public good, but cautions that most states have no restrictions on its use

The LA Review of Books reviews Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s new book, Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights, and says he does not pull his punches

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse on all counts sends a chilling message about the acceptability of vigilantism

Professor Khiara M. Bridges appears on the Our Body Politic podcast to examine the way politicians use Critical Race Theory to win elections

Judge Jeremy Fogel, Executive Director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, comments on Judge Sarala Vidya Nagala ’08’s confirmation to the federal bench and says she is traditionally credentialed, but brings diverse life experience to the table

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says it’s important to remember that Rittenhouse is ultimately responsible for the deaths of two people

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and Senior Research Fellow Brandon V. Stracener examine the idea of creating a new licensed legal paraprofessional for limited practice and say rushing to implement a paralawyer program without public confidence that adequate oversight is ready could further degrade already-low confidence in legal discipline

The International Human Rights Law Clinic found 225 credible incidents of online freedom of expression violations against human rights defenders. 

Professor Andrew Bradt says that gamesmanship of the court is an inherent feature of our federal judicial system

Former Policy Advocacy Clinic teaching fellow Ahmed Lavalais discusses the clinic’s campaign to eliminate debt imposed on youth and families by the juvenile justice system

Professor Andrea Roth comments that investigators may view the 2002 allegation as supporting evidence for another allegation in regards to the sexual assault accusations against former Windsor Mayor Dominic Foppoli

Professor Orin Kerr says that what should be kept and what should be available is a relatively new question in law when referring to Facebook’s claims of deleting the data relating to the New Mexico militia group’s accounts

The gift from Ruth Greenspan Bell ’67 and her husband Joseph Bell will fund scholarships and programming at Berkeley Law’s environmental law and social justice centers.

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, says that the $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill will create new programs that come with complicated and time-consuming rule-making procedures

Lecturer Shanin Specter wins a huge verdict on behalf of his client, a man who suffered long-term neurological injuries from a medical mistake in brain surgery

Lecturer Rose Carmen Goldberg discusses how one law is responsible for decades of sexual assault in the military going unpunished 

Professors Katerina Linos, Steven Davidoff Solomon, Abbye Atkinson, Elisabeth Semel, Laurel E. Fletcher, and Jeffrey Selbin are honored for their contributions to scholarship and legal education. 

Savala Nolan writes the trope of the “Angry Black Woman” is meant to control and undermine Black women

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, in response to the banning of critical race theory, says that whenever the government regulates speech, it has to be clear about what’s prohibited and what’s allowed

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, says that developed countries are not doing enough to support developing nations in their transition to clean energy or their struggles to adapt to climate change

Professor Ian Haney Lopez says that it is false that racial dog whistles are obvious and only appeal to people who are racist

Professor Holly Doremus says that nature can be allowed to function without human interference within reserves, while humans can be allowed to function without concern for nature outside them

Professor Catherine Fisk says filmmaking was the original gig economy, and reflecting on how the movie business dealt with solving problems of pay and portable benefits provides lessons for today

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at the Center for Law, Energy and Environment, and Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, discuss what California is bringing to the international climate table and potential ideas it might take back from the discussion

LL.M. students and final-round competitors Laura Quazzo and Capucine Freydrich see the experience enhancing their legal careers.

Professor Russel Robinson urges Dave Chappelle’s to use his talent to recognize, respect and champion all Black people, including the Black LGBTQ community

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says essentially, abortion restrictions do not have race-neutral effects

Lecturer Mark LeHocky discusses the steps that improve settlement efforts that will save time, resources and relationships.

“Borderlines” and a blog series on human rights broadens the reach of Berkeley Law’s hub for international law. 

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and Senior Research Fellow Stephen M. Duvernay examine proposed reforms to the state’s process for recalling statewide officers

Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy explains why the fee to cash checks is too high and argues that consumers should instead pay a much lower, flatter fee

The Life Sciences Project is a new place to explore intellectual property, innovation, and regulatory issues across a broad range of products and technologies.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains why the Supreme Court debate over Texas’s SB8 is about nothing less than whether every state must follow the Constitution — or whether a state can be permitted to make a mockery of it

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says no issues in our society are more controversial or more reflective of our political divide than abortion and guns, as both come before the Supreme Court this week

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses SB8 and the brief he co-authored in support of the DOJ’s position, as the Supreme Court looks at the controversial Texas abortion law

David Carrillo, Executive Director of the California Constitution Center, warns against raising the recall bar too high and says making it even harder to use the recall could take it from a rare bird to an extinct species

Lecturer Susan Mac Cormac Taylor discusses the pro bono project she started with the Berkeley Center for Law and Business to help small businesses shuttered by Covid

Professor Khiara M. Bridges say if we win access for trans people of color who are in rural areas, who are poor — then everyone else wins

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at the Center for Law, Energy and Environment, says the stakes are high as a 23-member official delegation from California led by Governor Gavin Newsom heads to Glasgow for the United Nations climate change conference 

Professor john a. powell, Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute, says while race, as a biological concept, is an illusion, racism is a sociological fact when discussing critical race theory in reference to the film, The Power of an Illusion

Ted Mermin, Executive Director of the Berkeley Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice, says, if you have consumer debt, make sure the statute of limitations hasn’t run before you pay

The next president of the Environmental Law Institute, Diamond greatly expanded the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment’s programming, expertise, and impact. 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky appears on Slate/Dahlia Lithwick’s Amicus podcast to discuss the Supreme Court’s latest rulings on police immunity and his book, Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights

Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy suggests allowing the U.S. Postal Service to offer check-cashing services for a few dollars a check will pay for Congress’s stimulus measure and put $2 billion a year in the pockets of the most financially vulnerable Americans

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, explores strategies for reducing transportation emissions

Professor Tejas Narechania says the FCC’s proposal to crack town on spam texts is a good start, but warns it is a hard issue to address

Mark Cohen, senior fellow and director of the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, discusses the DOJ’s The China Initiative says he is deeply concerned about technology transfer to China, but the FBI is going too far

Farber says failing to strike the right balance between curtailing executive power and enabling its use when needed carries major consequences.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, with Laurence H Tribe, Jeffrey Abramson and Dennis Aftergut, explains why SB 8 not only stripped Texan women of their rights under Roe v Wade, but made a mockery of the US constitution and the supremacy of the federal courts