By Gwyneth K. Shaw
Seven UC Berkeley Law professors have been awarded faculty chairs for their accomplishments and contributions to scholarship, policy, and legal education.
“A chaired position is the highest honor a university can bestow. It reflects exceptional excellence in teaching and scholarship,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says. “These individuals are all eminently deserving of chaired positions and enormously enrich Berkeley Law as outstanding scholars and teachers.”
Here’s a look at each of these scholars and their areas of expertise.
Shannon Cecil Turner Professor of Jurisprudence Andrew D. Bradt
Bradt, also the faculty director of the Civil Justice Research Initiative, writes and teaches primarily in the areas of civil procedure, conflict of laws, and civil remedies. He has a particular interest in multidistrict litigation and is at work on a book on the topic.
Bradt joined the UC Berkeley Law faculty in 2012 and won the school’s Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction in 2019. He’s serving a five-year term as Associate Reporter to the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules of the Judicial Conference of the United States and in 2019 was elected to the American Law Institute, where he is part of the Members Consultative Groups for the Restatement (Third), Conflict of Laws, and the Restatement (Third), Torts: Remedies.
“I’m so thrilled to join the long line of Berkeley Law professors to hold this chair, which dates back to when we were known as the ‘Department of Jurisprudence,’” he says. “It means a great deal to me to have this connection to the history of this great institution.”
Elizabeth J. Boalt Distinguished Professor of Law Hanoch Dagan
Dagan came to the school in 2023 after more than three decades at Tel Aviv University. A world-renowned and prolific scholar of private law theory, his most recent book, Relational Justice: A Theory of Private Law, with co-author Avihay Dorfman, builds on years of their scholarship to lay out a new approach to understanding some of society’s most important touchstones and has drawn rave reviews. In January, Advanced Introduction to Private Law Theory will be published.
He’s also the founding director of the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory, which studies and fosters dialogue about the legal building blocks that most profoundly affect our social and economic life — property, contract, and tort law, as well as central aspects of family law, trust law, work law, and more.
Freedom of Contract, Dagan’s next project, with Columbia Law School Professor Michael Heller, shows how contract law enhances individual autonomy. Dagan and Heller seek to answer the big questions of contract theory and resolve long-standing doctrinal debates in contract law, demonstrating how to align contract law more closely with its animating liberal values. Grounding contract in self-determination requires law must adhere, as it mostly does, to three autonomy-based principles: “proactive facilitation,” “regard for the future self,” and “relational justice,” they argue.
Braiding these principles into a compelling theory of liberal contract is the main task of Freedom of Contract and the foundation of the book’s doctrinal work and reformist agenda. Dagan and Heller aim to refocus how contract law should be practiced, taught, and reformed by defining freedom of contract as the right to pursue voluntary joint plans facilitated by autonomy-enhancing law that offers adequate choice, protects our future selves, and ensures relational justice.
George R. Johnson Professor of Law Stavros Gadinis
Gadinis, who’s also the faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business (BCLB), joined the faculty in 2010.
“I’m deeply honored to be named the George R. Johnson Professor of Law, a recognition of my research on how corporations navigate socially controversial issues through innovative self-governance frameworks,” he says. “This appointment strengthens my commitment to advancing scholarship that addresses the complex challenges facing businesses as they grapple with society’s most pressing concerns.”
His research examines how corporations develop internal governance mechanisms to manage controversial issues — from sustainability and environmental responsibility to artificial intelligence ethics, from evolving workplace relationships to cryptocurrency regulation. As forward-thinking companies create self-governing frameworks rather than wait for external mandates, BCLB is studying these emerging models in real time.
“Whether analyzing corporate responses to climate change, examining AI governance structures, or studying how companies navigate workplace culture shifts, our work provides practical insights for legal practitioners guiding their clients through these complex territories,” Gadinis says. “I look forward to continuing this research and working with colleagues, students, and industry partners to understand how corporate self-governance can effectively address tomorrow’s controversial issues.”
Michael Heyman Professor of Law Katerina Linos
Linos, who joined the faculty in 2010 and was previously the Irving G. and Eleanor D. Tragen Professor of Law, is also the co-director of the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law. Her research is empirical and focused on developing and applying new qualitative and quantitative methods and has appeared in law reviews and peer-reviewed journals.
Her 2013 book The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion: How Health, Family and Employment Laws Spread Across Countries won three national awards, and Linos has also analyzed international refugee policy and government use of emergency powers. She teaches in the areas of international business transactions, international law, European Union law, and international organizations.
Linos also created and hosts the “Borderlines” podcast, which features conversations with experts around the globe about pressing issues in international law. The show has a special series with current and former members of the European Union Court of Justice that explores the court’s role and impact.
A 2017 Carnegie fellow, Linos spent the 2024-25 academic year as a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences researching how the European Union develops comprehensive initiatives rapidly in the fields of technology, finance and migration.
Agnes Roddy Robb Professor of Jurisprudence, Ethics, and Social Responsibility Saira Mohamed
A scholar in the areas of international law, criminal law, and human rights, Mohamed’s research primarily focuses on questions of responsibility for wrongdoing in situations of armed conflict and mass atrocity. Her most recent projects examine how international and domestic law regulate the government’s treatment of its military personnel.
A faculty member since 2010, she was a Berlin Prize fellow in 2023 and won the Rutter Award this past spring.
Mohamed served as a Vice President of the American Society of International Law from 2023 to 2025 and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and an appointed expert for the Moscow Mechanism of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Mohamed says she’s particularly excited to follow in the footsteps of two titans of UC Berkeley Law, Lauren Edelman Ph.D. ’86 and Stephen Sugarman, who held the professorship before her.
“I am proud to be a faculty member of this great public university, and I am deeply honored and grateful to receive this chair,” Mohamed says. “And to be named to the chair that was previously held by the late Lauren Edelman and Steve Sugarman — dear colleagues who were exemplary scholars and members of the Berkeley community — makes this even more special.”
Irving G. and Eleanor D. Tragen Professor of Comparative Law Ayelet Shachar
Shachar is an internationally renowned scholar who has taught and published on a wide variety of topics, including American and comparative immigration law and policy, citizenship theory, borders and human rights, transnational law, and women’s rights and religious diversity. She is the author of more than 100 articles and several major books, including The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality and The Shifting Border: Legal Cartographies of Migration and Mobility.
She joined the faculty in 2023 and holds deep transnational links to Canada and Germany, where she previously served as Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Her research has been recognized by national and international excellence awards. In 2019, she was awarded the Leibniz Prize — one of Europe’s most prestigious research awards — for her groundbreaking work on citizenship and legal frameworks of accommodation in diverse societies.
In 2024, she won the American Political Science Association’s Migration & Citizenship Career Achievement Award, the first woman and the youngest scholar to have earned the accolade.
Thomas David and Judith Swope Clark Professor of Constitutional Law Amanda L. Tyler
Tyler, previously the Shannon C. Turner Professor of Law, is the inaugural holder of the chair endowed by Tom Clark ’72 to honor his wife, who died in 2022.
Tyler joined the faculty in 2012 and won the Rutter Award in 2020. She is a past chair of the Federal Courts Section of the American Association of Law Schools and is an elected member of the American Law Institute.
Her research and teaching interests include the Supreme Court, federal courts, constitutional law, legal history, civil procedure, and statutory interpretation. In addition to a slew of scholarly articles, Tyler is the author of Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay and Habeas Corpus: A Very Short Introduction and is a co-editor of the widely used casebook Hart and Wechsler’s The Federal Courts and the Federal System.
A former clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Tyler interviewed Ginsburg when she visited UC Berkeley Law in 2019 for the inaugural lecture honoring the late Professor Herma Hill Kay. That conversation — a reflection on a groundbreaking life in the law — became the backbone of a co-authored book, Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life’s Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union, published in 2021, not long after Ginsburg’s death.
“I am deeply honored to be the inaugural holder of this chair. I am even more honored to have had the good fortune to get to know Tom Clark as a result,” Tyler says. “His generosity to Berkeley Law and love for this law school are inspirational.”