Top: Bertrall Ross, Stavros Gadinis, Katerina Linos, Prasad Krishnamurthy
Middle: Victoria Plaut, Ty Alper, Roxanna Altholz, Saira Mohamed
Bottom: Fred Smith, Michelle Cole, Michael Musheno, Helene Silverberg
By Andrew Cohen
Six years after Dean Christopher Edley, Jr. committed to grow Berkeley Law’s faculty by an ambitious 40 percent, the law school has achieved that goal by hiring nine new faculty members—bringing to 40 the number of new hires since 2004.
This dramatic growth has enabled to the law school to enrich course offerings, improve its faculty/student ratio, strengthen its multidisciplinary research centers and clinics, and expand options for custom-tailored degrees and individual attention. The faculty surge also helped Berkeley Law launch its Summer LL.M. and International and Executive Legal Education programs last year, establish specialized certificates in International Law, Clean Tech, and Business Law, and hire a full-time professional skills director.
The nine faculty members hired this year are Ty Alper, Roxanna Altholz, Stavros Gadinis, Prasad Krishnamurthy, Katerina Linos, Saira Mohammed, Victoria Plaut, Bertrall Ross, and Fred Smith, Jr.
Other new faces at the school include lecturers Michelle Cole and Emily Bruce, Professor Michael Musheno (director of Legal Studies), statistician Su Li and visitors Helene Silverberg, Richard Perry, Russell Robinson and Mario Rosati.
Their wide-ranging scholarly interests include private-equity financial transactions, social conflict and urban change, trends in judicial interpretation of statues, international business transactions, capital punishment, health law and bioethics, international public law enforcement in the face of climate change, human rights and terrorism, political methodology and competition in multi-party democracies, and the tension between intellectual property law and rapidly changing technology.
Soon after his arrival in 2004, Edley made the recruitment and retention of top faculty a key pillar of the Campaign for Boalt Hall.
“The number of world-class scholars who have chosen to teach here affirms Berkeley Law’s status as a premier law school,” says Edley. “Besides providing a richer educational experience for our students, a larger, more diverse faculty enables the school to conduct a far more ambitions research and service agenda.”