Paul Schwartz, a preeminent international authority on privacy, copyright, telecommunications and information law, will join the faculty as professor of law. Eric Biber, a top-notch environmental law specialist, will sign on to the faculty as well, and Melissa Murray will bring a distinguished background in family law to her classes when she begins teaching in the fall. At the same time, Jeffrey Selbin, Executive Director of the East Bay Community Law Center, will move from resident lecturer to clinical professor.
These appointments are the latest in Boalt’s ongoing efforts under Dean Christopher Edley to expand the law school’s teaching and research portfolio in multiple areas of the law by recruiting and retaining premier legal talent.
Schwartz, the Anita and Stuart Subotnick Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, where he has taught since 1998, was a visiting professor at Boalt for the 2005-06 academic year and teaches Information Privacy Law. His research focuses on ways in which the law has attempted to regulate and shape informational technology, and the impact of information technology on law and democracy.
In addition to his considerable scholarship at home and abroad, Schwartz has provided advice and testimony to numerous governmental agencies in the United States and Europe. During 2002-03, he was in residence as a Berlin Prize Fellow at The American Academy in Berlin, and as a Transatlantic Fellow at The German Marshall Fund of the United States in Brussels. Schwartz also served as an adviser to the Commission of the European Union on privacy issues, and as co-chair for a series of annual institutes on privacy law in New York and San Francisco on behalf of the Practising Law Institute. He is the coauthor of Information Privacy Law (second edition, 2006); and Data Protection Law and On-Line Services: Regulatory Responses (1998), a study conducted for the Commission of the European Union that looks at emerging issues in Internet privacy in four European countries.
Schwartz is a graduate of Yale Law School, where he served as a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal. He received his undergraduate education at Brown University, and is the recipient of a Humboldt Scholar Grant, a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. Prior to his appointment at Brooklyn Law School, Schwartz taught at the University of Arkansas School of Law (Fayetteville).
Biber is a distinguished environmental scholar specializing in conservation biology, land-use planning and public lands law. He most recently worked in the Denver office of Earthjustice, a public-interest nonprofit organization focusing on public lands and related environmental issues. He taught public lands law as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. Biber holds a master’s degree in environmental science from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was winner of the 2001 Margaret Gruter Prize for the best paper on law, ethology, biology and related behavioral sciences. Following law school, Biber clerked for Judge Carlos Lucero of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver and Judge Judith Rogers of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Murray brings considerable background and novel theoretical perspectives in family law and a special interest in women and the law to her new faculty position at Boalt. Prior to joining Boalt, Murray served for two years as an associate in law at Columbia Law School, where she taught family law and legal writing and analysis.
A graduate of Yale Law School, she earned special recognition as a NAACP-LDF/Shearman & Sterling Scholar. Following law school, Murray clerked for Judge Sonia Sotomayer of the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals and Judge Stefan Underhill of the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut. Recent publications include “I’d Like to Thank the Academy: Duncan Kennedy, CLS, and the Limits of Critique” in the Journal of Legal Education (2005) and “Whatever Happened to G.I. Jane: Citizenship, Gender and Social Policy in the Postwar Era” in the Michigan Journal of Gender and the Law (2002).
Selbin, who directs the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), Boalt’s community-based legal clinic, has practiced as a supervising clinician for 16 years and is active in local and national clinical legal education efforts. As EBCLC executive director, Selbin oversees a staff of 20 as well as 20-30 law student interns each semester. A former Skadden Fellow, he founded EBCLC’s HIV/AIDS Law Project in 1990, and is a contributor to AIDS & the Law on public benefits and family law issues. He has been a lecturer at Boalt since 1997 and teaches Community Law Practice.
Selbin serves on the state bar Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services, which is dedicated to improving and increasing access to justice for low-income Californians. He was named to the Triage Task Force of the California Commission on Access to Justice. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a Certificat d’Etudes Politiques from L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris. He received his undergraduate education at the University of Michigan.
Philip Frickey, the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor at Boalt who has chaired the faculty appointments committee for the past three years, calls this “another major step in enhancing the quality and depth of the Boalt faculty along the lines charted by Dean Edley’s ambitious plan to grow the faculty strategically. Along with Professors Gillian Lester (formerly of UCLA) and Eric Talley (formerly of USC), whose appointments to the Boalt faculty were announced earlier this year, the additions of professors Biber, Murray, Schwartz and Selbin give Boalt much greater strength in a number of important fields.”