By Gwyneth K. Shaw
Speaking to the audience at Berkeley Law’s Alumni Awards & Donor Celebration to accept the Citation Award, legendary civil rights lawyer John Burris ’73 reflected not only on his time at the school and its impact on his career, but on the childhood events that lit his passion for justice.
The murder of Emmett Till. The violent fight to desegregate schools in the South. The bloody early days of the civil rights movement.
“When I was a young boy, I saw this, and it had tremendous impact on me, and it sort of burned in my brain — how could something like this happen, and that maybe there was somewhere in life I would be able to do something about it,” he said.
In 1968, Burris was working as an accountant when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated within two months of one another. In his shock, he wondered whether he was on the right track.
“I decided right then that I was going to go to law school — and go to law school in a way that I can make a difference,” he said.
That shift sparked a career using the legal system to fight injustice and advance civil rights, including representing more than 1,000 victims of police misconduct. Burris was part of Rodney King’s legal team and represented the family of Oscar Grant, who was killed by a BART police officer in 2009. He and a co-counsel settled a class action lawsuit representing 119 plaintiffs against the Oakland Police Department, prompting ongoing federal oversight of the force.
His work, Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said, “demonstrates the power of law to confront injustice and to drive meaningful change.”
Burris has also been a mentor to younger lawyers and has stayed deeply connected to the law school, establishing a scholarship and a public interest fellowship.
“John Burris’ career reflects the very best of Berkeley Law: A steadfast commitment to justice, a willingness to challenge systems of power, and a belief that law can be a force for good,” Chemerinsky said.
The Citation Award is Berkeley Law’s highest honor, recognizing exceptional contributions to the school, the bar, the bench, legal scholarship, the state, the nation, and the world. Burris was joined at the event by this year’s other honorees: Professor Peter S. Menell received the Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award, Lillian Hardy ’06 was honored with the Ascendant Leadership Award, and U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Nicole Berner ’95 was presented with the Judge D. Lowell and Barbara Jensen Public Service Award.
Reflecting with gratitude
Tech law titan Menell joked that he was surprised to be honored, since “I did not know the lifetime achievement awards were bestowed at the career midpoint.” After crediting Harrison Ford for that line, Menell donned a fedora and invited the audience to join him on an Indiana Jones adventure to “solve the mystery of how a shy nerdy misfit got to this podium.” He traced his path from his undergraduate days at MIT to Harvard Law School, where he began to see the advantages of combining law with a facility for science and technology.
As a Ph.D. student at Stanford, he was exposed to the fast-growing, envelope-pushing entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, and interdisciplinary research became his passion.
“Joining the Berkeley Law faculty, just as a digital tsunami was cresting, was extremely exciting,” Menell said.
When the dean asked for curriculum ideas soon after Menell arrived at Berkeley, Menell circulated a memo proposing a center on law and technology — and was met with some skeptical reactions. After some convincing of his colleagues, and persuading Professor Robert P. Merges to join the faculty, the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT) was born in 1994, the first of its kind at a law school.
Ever since, law and technology has been a cornerstone of Berkeley Law, attracting students who want to be at the forefront of innovation and law. BCLT is a major influence on the sector, and alumni work across the valley on everything from intellectual property to the life sciences.
“It’s been a wonderful life, and Berkeley has provided an unparalleled crucible for a somewhat less shy but still geeky misfit,” Menell said.
Paying it forward
Hardy’s award is given to a graduate from the past 20 years who has made significant contributions to their community through professional excellence, charitable efforts, public service, exceptional dedication to the law school, or other outstanding achievements. Looking out at the crowd, Hardy described the many people in the audience — family, friends, classmates, and professional mentors — who helped her along the way.
Now a partner at Hogan Lovells, Hardy reminisced about how her mother, a UC Berkeley employee, brought her to campus often as a child. As she grew, the support for her judgment and passions, “were affirming in ways that make it possible for me to stand here today receiving an award that’s about leadership.”
After recounting her own gratitude, Hardy issued a plea to fellow alums and supporters of Berkeley Law.
“Let’s redouble our commitment to being supporters of others. Let’s support their ideas. Let’s support their strategies, even when they’re unconventional,” she said. “What we can do as Berkeley Law alums is defined in the way that we support one another, and if you can just find a category of mentorship — even a bite-sized piece that you can take on — do it. Let that be part of your legacy.”
Power with responsibility
The Judge D. Lowell Barbara Genesis Public Service Award recognizes a Berkeley Law graduate who has demonstrated outstanding dedication to public service in the legal profession.
Berner, a longtime public interest lawyer who was appointed to the bench by then-President Joe Biden in 2024, said she’d never imagined during her time as a student that she would be a federal judge. What she did know “was that I wanted to use the law in service of people whose voices too often went unheard.”
“At Berkeley Law, I learned how to analyze legal questions rigorously,” she said. “I also learned to ask whose voice is missing, who is at risk, who has been excluded from the laws of power, and these lessons stayed with me throughout my years as a union lawyer, and I carry them with me to the bench.”
Reflecting on the United States’ 250th birthday, Berner said judges and lawyers stand as a bulwark for maintaining our democracy.
“Preserving public confidence in our public institutions and the rule of law is the responsibility all of us share,” she said. “We are living now through a period in which the government, public servants, judges, and even the rule of law have come under attack. Criticism of institutions is inevitable, and it is healthy in a democracy, but criticism must not devolve into cynicism, and disagreement cannot become distrust in our institutions.
“Our institutions make democratic self-government possible.”
The final honor of the evening went to Chemerinsky, whose term as dean was recently extended by the UC Berkeley administration to July 31, 2029.
Catherine E. Lhamon, the executive director of the school’s Edley Center on Law and Democracy, thanked Chemerinsky for staying on amid great uncertainty.
“This is a time when the federal government is on an all-out assault against universities writ large, and this one specifically,” she said. “So it is an enormous gift to have the dean’s gifts to keep continuing our good work, and to make sure, as he has already done this year, that we will change not an iota of our core commitments and our core work at the law school, even when we are at extraordinary risk for federal funds loss, and even when we live such an uncertain future for what we do.
“This is an extraordinary law school. We are so lucky to have Dean Chemerinsky to commit to two more years here to lead with us and continue to share its unparalleled regal gifts in vibrant harmony with purpose and to rise to the high stakes.”