By Andrew Cohen
Kenton King ’87 still isn’t sure how spending four years in Japan working for a large trading company prepared him for Berkeley Law — but he’s sure Berkeley Law fully prepared him for what followed.
“It was a remarkably rich, vibrant, and wonderful experience,” King said during the school’s recent annual Alumni Awards and Donor Celebration. “When I went to law school here, the tuition was $750 per semester. It’s a remarkable place that just opened up many doors.”
A renowned corporate attorney, King received this year’s Citation Award — Berkeley Law’s highest honor that recognizes exceptional contributions across several areas. Professor Eric Rakowski was given the Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award, Tam Ma ’11 the Young Alumni Award, and Ann Brick ’75 the Judge D. Lowell and Barbara Jensen Public Service Award.
King has in the past served as the global co-head of Skadden’s corporate transactions practice, partner-in-charge of its Palo Alto office, and a long-time member of the firm’s policy committee, its top governance body. The Daily Journal rated him one of the last decade’s top 10 lawyers and he appears regularly on a slew of top attorney lists while maintaining an active pro bono practice and advising companies on M&A, shareholder activism, crisis management, corporate governance, and ESG matters.
A board member of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business since 2006, King has played a meaningful role in expanding the law school’s business programming. Also serving on the Berkeley Law Alumni Association board of director for a second time, he said the hardest he has ever worked was while editor in chief of the California Law Review.
“All the skills I learned in terms of leading a professional services organization and a group of lawyers, I learned as editor in chief,” King said. “The larger Berkeley community continues to grow and be a source of support for me, all of us here, and future generations.”
A Gratitude-fueled career
Ma was a first-generation college student overflowing with excitement and gratitude when she first enrolled at UC Berkeley 26 years ago as an undergraduate.
“I felt I had won the golden ticket,” she recalled. “I was a kid in the candy store. There were so many ways to get engaged in the communities I cared about.”
Ma brought that ethos to Berkeley Law and then a career dedicated to improving the well-being of Californians. She has shaped health care policy in various roles, including her current position as Associate Vice President for Health Policy and Regulatory Affairs at University of California Health, the nation’s largest public academic health care system.
Having previously spent four years as Governor Gavin Newsom’s deputy legislative secretary, Ma advanced initiatives such as expanding health coverage to all Californians with low incomes regardless of immigration status, bringing down the cost of prescription drugs such as insulin, and guiding policymakers on the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including equitable vaccine distribution.
“It’s an honor to be recognized for work that you love to do,” said Ma, who serves with King on the Berkeley Law Alumni Association board. “Our work on the alumni board is also really important to me, because I benefited from the time, energy, and resources that alumni extended to me when I was a student.”
An active volunteer and mentor in several organizations, Ma mentioned that she’s working to start an alumni regional chapter in Sacramento — then showcased her leadership skills by pointing to some fellow Sacramento-area grads and saying, “Yes, you just got voluntold” to help with this effort.
Navigating profound changes
Rakowski opened his remarks by suggesting an edit: “Lifetime Achievement Award — seems maybe I’m oversensitive, but it carries an unspoken implication that maybe there’s nothing left but shuffleboard and canasta … Why not just call it the Faculty Achievement Award?”
A Berkeley Law professor for 34 years and a noted expert on tax law as well as estates and trusts issues, Rakowski entered academia with two degrees each from Harvard and Oxford, clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan Jr., and gained tax law experience at Davis Polk & Wardwell.
“So much has changed during my years here … When I joined in 1990, we had fewer than 45 faculty members and now it’s about double that,” he said. “We had no clinical program when I arrived, and now have a thriving clinical program. When I was associate dean in the ’90s, legal writing was taught by recent graduates … we now have a professional core of instruction and it’s a much finer program. And physically of course the law school has changed in many ways.”
Former director of the school’s Kadish Center for Morality, Law & Public Affairs, Rakowski also noted the creation of two dozen research centers and growth of the LL.M. Program from fewer than 30 people a year to around 300. Berkeley Law’s Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction winner in 2010, he was elected to the prestigious American Law Institute and is the editor of Estate Planning & California Probate Reporter.
“What strikes me is how astonishing our students have been from the time I came here,” Rakowski said. “They’re intelligent, they’re challenging … they’re inquisitive, and they’re ambitious, not only in pursuit of wealth or honor but they want to advance their sense of justice. I think that’s remarkable and one of the great strengths of our school.
“This is also an almost uniquely collaborative faculty. My colleagues are inventive, they’re good humored, they’re supportive rather than competitive, and so it’s been a joy for me … Going to the office every day has felt a lot less like holding down a job than exercising a privilege.”
Public mission personified
Brick recalled viewing Berkeley Law as a perfect outlet for her public interest passion in the early 1970s, and how studying First Amendment law under Professors Robert Cole and Jesse Choper proved transformative.
The first female partner at Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk and Rabkin, she eventually left the firm to spend the next 19 years as a staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. There, she has produced leading legal work on a host of civil liberties cases, ranging from student rights to internet free speech to challenges to government actions in connection with the War on Terror.
Both at Howard, Rice and at the ACLU, she said, “I learned that you can do public interest law and still be at a private law firm. The enormous generosity of lawyers in private practice here in the Bay Area, they’re the ones who make it possible for public interest organizations to do so much of the work they do.”
Her impactful work on many high-profile cases includes Flores v. Morgan Hill Unified School District, which established a groundbreaking anti-gay school harassment program in 2003. Another past Berkeley Law Alumni Association Board member, Brick urged those in attendance to use their law degrees for good.
“As we sit here today, the very essence of democracy is on the line,” she said. “As lawyers we are uniquely well positioned to defend our democratic institutions by speaking out and by speaking up.”