By Gwyneth K. Shaw
Berkeley Law’s strong run of faculty hiring under Dean Erwin Chemerinsky continues, with two new members — Professor Daniel Harawa and Assistant Professor Aaron Hall — joining the school this academic year.
Harawa will arrive in January from New York University School of Law, where he was also director of the Federal Appellate Clinic. His scholarship on race and the criminal justice system has been widely published, including a recent article, “Coloring in the Fourth Amendment,” in the Harvard Law Review.
Hall began in July, coming from the University of Minnesota’s history department. A legal historian of colonial America and the 19th-century United States, with a particular focus on entanglements of slavery, constitutionalism, and governance, Hall earned his J.D. at Harvard Law School and his Ph.D. in UC Berkeley’s history department.
His current book project, The Founding Rules: Slavery and the Creation of American Constitutionalism, 1789-1889, uncovers the deep roots of originalism by digging into the constitutionalism produced by struggles over slavery and state power in the Early Republic.
“We have two terrific new faculty joining us,” Chemerinsky says. “Professor Harawa brings significant practice experience and is a top scholar in the area of criminal procedure. Professor Hall is an outstanding legal historian. Both will be great additions to our faculty in the courses they will teach and in their scholarship.”
‘A lawyer’s lawyer’
Harawa, who began his academic career at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, practiced as a public defender in Washington, D.C., and at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He earned his J.D. at Georgetown University Law Center.
“Berkeley’s public mission is something that resonates deeply with me,” Harawa says. “I consider myself at heart a lawyer’s lawyer, and what Judge Harry Edwards calls a ‘practical scholar.’ My work is deeply shaped by a career representing people ensnared in the criminal legal system — so being at a school where public service is central to its identity is really exciting and important to me.”
He also said the school’s stellar faculty was a big draw, along with Chemerinsky’s leadership. During his nine years at the helm, Berkeley Law has hired more than 30 professors.
“The faculty was already amazing, but Erwin has recruited an incredible group, so I’m excited about my new colleagues,” Harawa says. “There’s great energy around the school. And the students obviously are some of the best in the country — they go on to do amazing work across so many different fields and sectors.
“I feel really lucky to be a part of the community.”
Harawa will teach Evidence, Criminal Law, and Criminal Procedure. After running NYU Law’s Federal Appellate Clinic, he hopes to establish a practicum in that area at Berkeley Law, ideally with a racial justice angle. He says his research is deeply rooted in experience with clients and considering how to translate the insights of critical race theory into the day-to-day operations of the judicial system.
“I see recurring patterns and themes that point to deeper systemic issues, so I try to identify what practices — both in how policing, prosecution, and incarceration systems operate, and in how the law operates within those systems — produce these patterns, and what we might do to disrupt them,” he says. “I particularly focus on race because over the course of more than a decade of practice, I think all but four of my clients have been people of color. That can’t be coincidental.”
That focus continues in the classroom, where Harawa strives to help students identify some of the unspoken assumptions embedded in the law and consider who benefits and who is disadvantaged by existing legal structures.
“I of course hope they understand how the law operates in real life, but I also want them to see the unstated aspects of the law and to think critically about their own role in the legal profession. When my students go out into the world, I want them to have the tools not only to practice, but to constantly ask what the law should be and what they are doing to make the legal system more just,” he says.
‘The opportunity of a lifetime’
Hall says he could “compile a very long list of reasons why I am thrilled to come to Berkeley,” centered on the overlapping intellectual communities at the law school and the broader campus. He’s teaching a seminar, Property and Power, and a legal history survey course in the undergraduate Legal Studies Program this year.
Hall is especially excited to join the school’s Ph.D.-granting Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) Program, known for its interdisciplinary scholars who study the law in the context of social science disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, and economics.
“First, it is the opportunity of a lifetime to become a part of the law school’s storied JSP program, a singular institution for studying law and society together with creativity and rigor. The program’s remarkable multidisciplinary faculty, scholarly vision, and teaching commitments resonate with how I approach legal history and with the kinds of advising and instruction that I am eager to pursue,” Hall says.
More broadly, he adds, “I cannot overstate my excitement about working among the law school’s deeply knowledgeable, curious and collegial faculty. I imagine most new hires express sentiments along these lines, as the wealth of expertise and spirit of inquiry at the law school are immediately, inspiringly evident. And more broadly still, the whole university is such a vibrant field of intellectual energy. Across campus, I know that I will regularly encounter students, colleagues, and visitors presenting unexpected questions and ideas — and I am thrilled to be able to participate in that field.”
Hall became interested in legal history while in law school, as his sense of the legal domain expanded. The Founding Rules approaches the authority of the United States’ constitutional founding as a question of historical development rather than as an inherent feature of our constitutional order. Looking across political, judicial, and civic realms, the book examines when, why, and how Americans constructed a closed moment of constitutional creation to govern their present through ascribed original understandings.
“American law is, of course, very concerned with the past, but what many traditional legal materials communicate about it is not only highly selective but also often represents features as natural, fixed, or given,” he says. “This makes legal history an especially complex and meaningful avenue for pursuing what I think of as the historian’s drive to glimpse the whole iceberg — to know what lies beneath or before the surface of a visible present object to more fully recognize its nature.”