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Obasogie and UC Berkeley School of Public Health Professor Darlene Francis hold a casual but frank conversation about how their field can improve. 

UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who chaired the city’s elected charter reform commission in 1999, said he thought the new proposal was a great idea, noting his commission had initially proposed an independent redistricting panel before the current structure was created.

“Does a state supreme court have the power to find that an act of the state legislature violates the state constitution? The answer to that question should be clear and obvious, but the conservative justices of the Supreme Court expressed doubt about it at oral arguments in Moore vs. Harper on Wednesday,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “It is not hyperbole to say that the future of American democracy may turn on the court’s answer.”

“The Constitution and American democracy would not survive another four years of Trump being president,” writes Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and professor of law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. “We now have Trump’s own words to prove it.”

A study from Berkeley Judicial Institute on law clerk selection and diversity is discussed. 

Dean Chemerinsky discusses rankings at US News.

Des Lafleur, a business attorney and lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Law who consults with companies on minimizing risk, said cybersecurity is something companies should be thinking about well before employees depart the company.

“There is always a tension between liberty and equality. Any law that prohibits discrimination limits the freedom to discriminate.” writes Dean Chemerinksy.

“The system is not set up to deal with the underlying problems. It’s set up to deal with the legal problems,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge in San Jose who now heads the Berkeley Judicial Institute at UC Berkeley School of Law. “The system is in some ways rigid and inflexible.”

“The judges we interviewed were thoughtful, sincere, and serious about their commitment to law clerk diversity as each of them defines it,” said the study’s co-author, former California federal Judge and head of the Berkeley Judicial Institute at UC Berkeley School of Law Jeremy Fogel. “The challenge for many of them is translating that commitment into specific practices that actually achieve the outcomes they seek.” 

“Boosting public transit could also have the added environmental benefit of limiting the production of new electric vehicles,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. “Cars take a lot of energy to manufacture and dispose of, and while electricity is a much cleaner fuel than petroleum, it’s far better to avoid buying a car in the first place,” he said. 

The Berkeley Judicial Institute’s new study on law clerk diversity is featured.

“It is much too soon to know what the impact of these developments will be on law schools and legal education,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean at UC Berkeley’s law school.

Dean Chemerinsky writes about two arguments in the Supreme Court.

Dean Chemerinksy discusses originalism and the Supreme Court.

“It came as no surprise in 2015 when the Department of Justice decided to close the criminal investigation in the United States and decided not to pursue charges against the agents,” said Berkeley Law’s International Human Rights Law Clinic co-director Roxanna Altholz.

Members of the school’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment and its California-China Climate Institute meet with key leaders and drive solutions to pressing issues.

The Humphrey Report from UC Berkeley School of Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic is cited in an editorial on bail in California.

The book project was an intellectual as well as a physical journey for Abrams, who needed to add new skills to her research toolbox to pull it off.

Dean Chemerinsky’s book Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism is included in David Lat’s spotlight of noteworthy new books about or related to the law.

Jeff Selbin, the director of the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law discusses California’s new law that will automatically seal most criminal records for those who complete their sentences.

 Berkeley Law professor John Yoo  said, the enactment of Proposition 209 kept the goal of racial diversity on the university’s front burner. “In a way it became culturally more deeply rooted now at the university than it was back in 1996,” he said.

“For years, CBP has also struggled with fully investigating and disciplining  its own agents for using excessive force on the job,” said Roxanna Altholz, co-director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. “Federal law prohibits victims from successfully filing civil lawsuits against Border Patrol agents, making accountability of them even more difficult.”

UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who has argued cases before the Supreme Court, said its past rulings on health issues, particularly the 2012 decision upholding most of the federal health care law, probably wouldn’t weaken the legal case for abortion rights.

“Sometimes rankings can do more harm than good,” said Dean Chemerinsky. “If the rankings are measuring the wrong things, then they’re not providing the right information.” 

“In Silicon Valley, there has historically been a don’t follow the rules mentality, because that’s how you get ahead,” said Steven Davidoff Solomon of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law. “Holmes may be the first, but I suspect there are going to be more.”

Berkeley Law’s dean Erwin Chemerinsky, along with University of Wisconsin’s Law School dean Daniel Tokaji, write about the ABA’s proposal to eliminate standardized tests for law school admissions. “At a minimum, we need more study and more data on the potential impact of such a radical change in admissions standards to avoid potential consequences to diversity, equity, and inclusion that are the opposite of what is intended,” write Chemerinsky and Tokaji.

A whopping 106 Berkeley Law students are participating in the program this semester, the most in Director Sue Schechter’s 16 years at the school.

Lecturer Shanin Specter discusses US Rep. Conor Lamb joining his firm Kline & Specter.

“Of all the potentially momentous cases on the Supreme Court’s docket this term, the one that frightens me most is Moore v. Harper. It is not hyperbole to say that the future of American democracy could be determined by this decision,” writes Dean Chemerinksy.

Dean Chemerinksy writes, “The great complexity of free speech issues on campus was revealed this semester at Berkeley Law. How are the free speech rights of a student group to not invite speakers with particular views to be balanced against the desire to have all viewpoints expressed and have no one feel excluded?”

Mass Media at Berkeley Law guest Mike Gillis describes charting new terrain to protect parody in support of an Ohio man whose Facebook page spoofed a local police department. 

“Nothing about Berkeley Law is fundamentally changed by this decision,” Dean Chemerinsky said. “We will be the law school we’ve always been, and we will strive to improve in accordance with our values.”

Dean Chemerinsky said the decision is not “railing against rankings” or complaining that it’s “hurt” Berkeley Law’s standing, but that the school has issues with U.S. News’ process, which has remained unchanged in the face of the law school’s complaints.

“Although rankings are inevitable and inevitably have some arbitrary features, there are aspects of the U.S. News rankings that are profoundly inconsistent with our values and public mission,” UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said in a statement. “Now is a moment when law schools need to express to U.S. News that they have created undesirable incentives for legal education.”

“Although rankings are inevitable and inevitably have some arbitrary features, there are aspects of the U.S. News rankings that are profoundly inconsistent with our values and public mission,” Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said in a note to the school community.

“What we found is that no one had really done a city-specific, CAP-specific analysis, so we were kind of starting from scratch,” said Ted Lamm, a senior research fellow at Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. “You can set as ambitious targets as you want. But if you don’t provide them the budget and the funds and the actual implementation tools to do it, it’s going to be a plan and nothing else.”

“We have one of the most vibrant urban squash programs for youth in the world at the Specter Center in West Philadelphia, combined with the Lenfest Center in North Philadelphia,” said Lecturer Shanin Specter. “This comes at a time when we Philadelphians are desperately trying to save the youth of our city. The Specter Center is a shining light of hope against desperation.”

“We are seeing a tremendous wave of worker organizing efforts across the country and this is another way I think that workers can raise their voices and be directly involved in raising standards in industry,” said Christina Chung, executive director of the Center for Law and Work at U.C. Berkeley Law School. “It’s really exciting, and I think other states will follow suit.”

The changes will enable more public interest-minded graduates to access the program, receive increased funding, and spend less of their own money on student loan expenses.

“There is a longstanding history of the military not being held accountable for sexual assaults that take place under its watch,” said Rose Carmen Goldberg, a veterans law lecturer at the University of California School of Law.

“The governor has standing,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the UC Berkeley School of Law. “And it’s confusing to the voters when you see him saying ‘vote no’ on something that otherwise seems like Democrats, who make up the majority of registered voters, would want to support.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean at UC Berkeley, said the court has dramatically changed its interpretation of language in the First Amendment that prohibits any law “respecting an establishment of religion.”

“It’s a complicated and unique area of the law with its own statutes and regulations,” said Lecturer Rose Carmen Goldberg.

Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the UC Berkeley School of Law discusses COP 27 in Egypt.

It’s “clear” that the cost of carbon emissions isn’t zero, according to University of California Berkeley law professor Dan Farber.

David Carrillo and Stephen M. Duvernay of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law write “There is one major disadvantage from making it difficult to remove judges, through rules or culture (or both): You can be stuck with a bad actor for life.” 

“The number one thing they’re going to worry about is the ability to pay back the loans,” said Berkeley Law professor Adam Badawi “Twitter misses a debt payment, that trips a covenant, and the loanholders can come in and say the debt is due right now.”

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recently considered the 2010 fatal beating of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas, thanks to years of work from the International Human Rights Law Clinic.