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Amanda Tyler, a constitutional law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, called habeas corpus “one of the single most foundational aspects of American law and the American constitution.” “What it does is empower courts to protect individual liberty,” Professor Tyler said. “It’s hard to imagine what could be more central to the role of courts in our constitutional structure.”

“It’s easy to assume that a judicial seat contest like this is related to the broader political environment, but we shouldn’t read too much into it,” said David A. Carrillo, executive director of Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center, referring to the race between Dixson and Bass. “Although they’re uncommon, occasional challenges to sitting judges or open-seat catfights do occur, so this isn’t exactly new,” Carrillo said. “And, as seems here, the challenger in these stories often fails.”

“This is a situation where history, text, precedent and tradition all point to one direction,” said Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, predicting a loss for one of the president’s most controversial policy initiatives.

This year’s honors went to John Burris ’73, Professor Peter S. Menell, Lillian Hardy ’06, and U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Nicole Berner ’95, with a special accolade for Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“Sometimes well-intentioned laws are unconstitutional,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “That is the case for a bill that recently passed the California Assembly to prevent children under the age of 16 from opening social media accounts.”

“California no longer has a death chamber,” said Elisabeth Semel, a UC Berkeley law professor and founding director of the law school’s Death Penalty Clinic, which provides legal representation for condemned prisoners. “It has been 20 years since the last execution. There are a host of logistical and legal issues that the state will have to confront administratively and in the courts before executions can resume.”

Taught by Berkeley Center for Law & Technology Executive Director Wayne Stacy — a former Big Law litigator and U.S. Patent Office leader — the course will focus on enhancing legal skills without lowering the threshold for human judgment and input.

Professor Claudia Polsky discusses taking on Trump in court.

Professor Khiara M. Bridges, author of Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans joins host Brittany Luse to talk through why wealth and status can’t outrun racism at the doctor’s office.

A leader of multiple Berkeley Law student organizations, Dasgupta is enjoying her “crash course in the world of international law-making and diplomacy.”

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

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

Jerath and her co-founder incorporated lessons from over 25,000 billable hours to craft a virtual program for law students and new associates “to take the knowledge, skills, and understanding junior corporate lawyers usually spend years piecing together and teach it all upfront.”

Berkeley Law professor Tejas Narechania said that while the details of energy and telecom regulation might be different, the industries have “economic features” in common. “How do we think about affordability across all of these utilities, and how do we think about universal access across all of these utilities?” he asked. “That’s a common set of problems, … a common set of economic thinking, and that’s why we have this single-purpose public utility commission in so many states.”

“The idea is to protect the formation of first-year law students by requiring them to do the reading, analysis and argumentation that is constitutive of legal work,” said Professor Chris Hoofnagle. “Once that happens, Berkeley offers many courses explicitly about A.I. lawyering.”

“If elite universities are serious about admitting students from across the economic spectrum, they should end admissions preferences for legacies and athletes and reform their system of nonacademic ratings,” writes Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy.

Working with a feminist organization in Georgia and the Equality Law Clinic at the Free University of Brussels, the group wrote a brief on behalf of a woman who had been charged with defamation after accusing her supervisor of sexual harassment. 

“President Donald Trump’s deal with the Department of Justice raises corruption to a level never seen before in this county,” write Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Burt Neuborne, founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. “It can — and must — be stopped.”

“On an almost daily basis, we are seeing the failure of the Constitution to provide adequate checks against a president determined to use the enormous powers of his office for the sake of retribution,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. 

Swift’s brilliance and grace inspired the alum, who wishes to remain anonymous, to donate $250,000 to start the fund. He hopes other alumni join him in paying tribute to Swift, who died in 2023 after a legendary career.

“Our policy is about developing students with the fundamental skills required for AI lawyering,” UC Berkeley Law School professor Chris Hoofnagle told Business Insider.

Named one of the nation’s 100 most influential corporate governance leaders, Dobrygowski describes the motivations driving both his pioneering work and his new book.

“There is a federal crime that prohibits exactly what the president did, and for exactly this reason, to prevent a corrupt president from using the IRS to their own advantage,” according to UC Berkeley Law professor Brian Galle, a former federal prosecutor with the Justice Department’s Tax Division. “This is an episode that would have brought down any other presidency in American history.”

“The trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI—in which the jury on Monday decided in favor of OpenAI due to the statute of limitations—was about many things: a clash of egos, a governance dispute, and a morality play with few morals,” writes Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy. “But it may be remembered as the first antitrust case of the artificial intelligence era, even though antitrust appears nowhere in the complaint.”

“Much rightly has been written criticizing the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which effectively nullified Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But one point that has not received sufficient attention is the decision’s blatant inconsistency with the principle that federal courts should not alter the conduct of elections soon before they are to occur.”

Khiara M. Bridges’ new book probes how maternal health disparities affect Black mothers at every rung of the socioeconomic ladder and the impact of interpersonal and structural racism on their pregnancies.

“Corporations are writing the rules of AI,” writes Professor Stavros Gadinis. “The law’s job is to discipline how they write.”

Vincent Joralemon, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley law school, said statutes of limitation vary by state and in California there is a three-year limit for breech of charitable trust and a two-year limit for unjust enrichment – two of the key claims Musk brought. “I’m guessing the jurors got into their room and said, ‘does it seem like Musk knew about this in 2019?’ and everyone said ‘yes’ and then they go, ‘we’re done,’” Joralemon said.

Professor Khiara M. Bridges discusses her latest book Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans.

Regardless of the ultimate outcome, neither tech magnate is likely to win in the court of public opinion, said University of California at Berkeley Law School professor Stavros Gadinis. “After weeks of damaging testimony, the public is left choosing between two dueling billionaires, each convinced he is the rightful steward of transformative technology,” Gadinis said by email. “The answer most people will reach is: neither.”

“The impacts of climate change – the health impacts and the disasters – leave people in greater and greater precarity,” said B Helen Kerwin, clinical supervising attorney, Human Rights Clinic. “They leave them less able to be resilient in place, and migration is the viable option.”

The school’s newest graduates are clerking for the supreme courts of five states this fall — Alaska, California, Hawaiʻi, New Jersey, and Nevada — as well as intermediate courts of appeal in Alaska and Hawaiʻi and state superior courts in Alaska and California.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and David A. Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at the University of California Berkeley law school weigh in on Governor Newsom’s delay in filling California Supreme Court seat.

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

UC Berkeley School of Law Lecturer Andrea Crider called the bill unnecessary. “From my understanding, the people who have been touting this legislation are largely conservative district attorneys, and they have used what I would describe as ‘extreme outlier cases’,” Crider said.

The landscape includes renowned faculty, lecturers with vast experience in the field, a surging research center, and a top journal that recently held its 50th anniversary symposium.

“A.I. has nothing to do with tobacco and an algorithm has nothing to do with the way a cigarette is designed, but the law is built by analogy,” said Ted Mermin, the executive director of the Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice at the University of California, Berkeley. “What the plaintiffs’ firms are doing is utilizing well-established legal principles in a new product area.”

“Constitutional amendments that were adopted to protect the civil rights of Black individuals were used by the Supreme Court to deal a devastating blow to voting rights for people of color last month.” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“One of the most important questions raised by the Musk vs Altman trial, where Elon Musk is claiming he was deceived into donating roughly $38mn to OpenAI, the company headed by Sam Altman, has little to do with courtroom strategy and a great deal to do with institutional design,” writes Professor Stavros Gadinis, faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business.

Judge Jeremey Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute joins Amicus with Dahlia Lithwick to discuss threats against American judges.

The students worked with San Jose State University undergraduates, getting a valuable hands-on opportunity while also offering pre-law mentoring.

“The grantees were given near-zero information about what was problematic in the execution of their grant,” said Claudia Polsky, a professor at UC Berkeley School of Law who is representing Foreman and other researchers in a suit they filed last year contesting a previous round of grant cancellations by the Trump administration. Polsky said her legal team was seeking more information about the 18 suspensions, but was concerned that the freezing of Foreman’s grant may violate a court order a federal judge issued in that case restoring the defunded projects.

“This is the most densely populated corridor west of the Mississippi and it’s the most densely populated part of Los Angeles,” Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, said. “Generally speaking, rail lines are successful when they serve densely populated areas.”

“We must understand that what is too often minimized as isolated incidents stemming from a particular family’s so-called disputes is oftentimes a warning sign demanding evidence-based approaches to save lives,” write Mallika Kaur, the director of the Domestic Violence and Gender-Based Violence Practicum, at UC Berkeley School of Law and Julia Weber.

“For years, California courts ran an unconstitutional shadow detention system.” writes Chesa Boudin, executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at Berkeley Law. “The mechanics were straightforward: Set bail at an amount the defendant cannot pay and the result is the same as ordering detention outright.”

“After all the court had done in its earlier decisions to limit the protection of voting rights, the one potent tool for protecting voting rights that remained was Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But as Kagan said, the court’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”

Sudanese refugees are using open-source tools developed at the center to document abuses at home. Their hope: Peace, and justice for victims.