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“It’s so disingenuous to say that we’re just going to allow political majorities in the state to determine the legality of abortion when not everybody in the state is going to be able to vote because of what Republicans are doing and because of what the Court is allowing them to do,” Professor Khiara M. Bridges says. “Our democracy is undeserving of that label.”

Megan Graham, of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, says any battle between the tech companies and governments about data collection should be done in public, so that regular people and privacy advocates can have their say. “Google’s voice is obviously important in the discussion because they have the data and they are the ones running he searches but their interests are not necessarily the same as the general public, or people who are concerned about privacy rights,” she says. 

Beginning Aug. 15, Plaut will oversee building, supporting, and maintaining UC Berkeley’s faculty in close collaboration with deans, department chairs, and Academic Senate colleagues.

Professor Daniel Farber says the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, which holds that the agency doesn’t have broad authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, is a hit to the fight against climate change but doesn’t completely tie the Biden administration’s hands. California’s strong laws will shield the state from much of the ruling’s impact, although the state does get electricity from affected states, he says. 

Luker, who co-founded Berkeley Law’s Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice, has interviewed hundreds of women about their experiences before and after the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling.

Galbreath is general counsel at Bitwise Industries, which builds tech economies in underestimated cities and helps marginalized people access opportunities in the industry.

“We live our lives online, we leave digital breadcrumbs of our prior activities, and of course those are going to be caught up in abortion investigations,” says Professor Catherine Crump, director of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic. Tech companies will almost certainly comply with state law and hand over information from legal court orders, but they should be transparent with their users and the public when they do and disclose how many abortion-related court orders they get, she adds.

Human Rights Center Executive Director Alexa Koenig discusses the growing use of open source intelligence (OSINT) as a way to document international atrocities and bolster human rights prosecutions. 

In a time of concern about a rise in retail theft, some politicians are seizing on viral videos to paint left-leaning city leaders as soft on crime. “These crimes deserve to be taken seriously, but they are also being weaponized ahead of the midterm elections,” Professor Jonathan Simon says. 

Phillip Gomez ’23 founded the Latino Rifle Association to create an alternative to traditional gun rights groups for Latinos interested in self-defense.

“If you have a period tracking app, you should delete it,” says Professor Catherine Crump, director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Policy Clinic. “Tech companies like everyone else has to comply with law and they may not have a choice about what data they collect, what data they are forced to disclose. The law enforcement agency gets a warrant and serves it on Google and asks for location information and it’s a valid warrant. Google is going to have a hard time not complying with that.”

“Someday, when there is a liberal Supreme Court, it likely will overrule Dobbs and again recognize a constitutional right to abortion. But in the years and perhaps decades until that happens, abortion will be the defining political issue for the U.S.,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes. “It is unclear what that will mean for our political system … The central question in the abortion debate is who should decide.”

“It is stunning how far and how fast the conservative justices have moved to overrule constitutional law principles in a single week,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes about the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District case involving prayer in schools. “It’s clear that they would have decided countless cases over the last half-century differently from their predecessors, and have no hesitation eliminating precedents they don’t like. The implications for all of our rights and the society we will live in is staggering.”

Professor Rebecca Wexler, a faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, talks about how big and small tech companies will need to have a response to the question of what to do with users’ data if new laws try to restrict access to information about abortion and other reproductive services in the post-Roe environment. “Anything they do or don’t do, it’s going to be a choice with consequences. It also means they’ve got a lot of power at this point,” she says. “They have power to reclaim some of the privacy from government intrusion that Roe once guaranteed, and that the court has just eviscerated.”

While much is written about the potential promise of quantum computers, “their simpler cousins — quantum sensors — are here now and improving at a rate that demands urgent attention,” writes Professor Chris Hoofnagle and a co-author. “Strategists must understand the new capabilities that quantum sensing will provide and start planning countermeasures today.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses John Eastman, whom he has publicly urged the State Bar of California to investigate because of his activities after the 2020 presidential election. Chemerinsky debated Eastman on a radio show for years but says his last appearance with him, in October 2020, still disturbed him more than a year later. “It was the first time I ever debated him where he wasn’t civil. I felt like I was debating Donald Trump,” he says.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses the overturning of Roe v. Wade and other recent Supreme Court decisions. “The reality is that Supreme Court decisions are always a product of the ideology of the justices,” he says. 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says said that while the right to travel, including to get an abortion, is protected, he expects conservative states will pass laws that try to prohibit women from leaving in order to get an abortion. “That should be unconstitutional, but we’ll see what the court does,” he says.

Professor Khiara M. Bridges talks about the racial dynamics of the fight over abortion, and how they shaped the events that led to the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade. 

“The decisions this week must be understood as a conservative majority favoring conservative political ideology: requiring aid for religious instruction, greatly expanding gun rights, ending abortion rights,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says. “It is not about judicial philosophy or constitutional interpretation. It is about conservatives moving constitutional law very far and very fast in a very conservative direction.”

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade presents an imperative for California to “be on the offensive” but putting additional money and effort into ensuring its residents, and those coming from the outside to receive care, can access contraceptives and abortion services. “When you have a law that makes abortion unavailable, you have a law that makes unavailable a service upon which Black people disproportionately rely, so there’s a specific racial impact,” she says, noting that Black people have not only higher rates of unintended pregnancy but also higher rates of maternal mortality and morbidity.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision allowing many states to end or sharply curtail abortion rights will have profoundly harmful effects on those who are forced to continue unwanted pregnancies and on democracy itself, says Berkeley Law scholar.

Key research by Berkeley Law’s Death Penalty Clinic is helping courts and state legislatures tackle racial discrimination in jury selection across the country.

“There’s an open legal question about whether states could limit the use of mifepristone in light of the FDA’s judgment that the medicine is safe and effective. It’s not at all clear,” Professor Khiara M. Bridges says. “States can regulate the practice of medicine within their borders.”

Professor Rebecca Wexler discusses the role of big tech in a post-Roe world, and why the fight over sensitive data will be of essence to protect patients. 

The Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade decision raises a host of thorny legal issues for pregnant people, healthcare providers, and state governments, Professor Khiara M. Bridges says. “We are going to see an abundance of lawsuits for the next 10 years, if not longer, around what states can and cannot do to regulate abortion,” she says. “It’s complicated. There aren’t easy answers, and there’s a lot of uncertainty.”

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says the Supreme Court’s recent decisions have sent a message to conservative state lawmakers that it won’t stand in the way of laws restricting birth control methods. “It’s all of the implications of the Dobbs decision that make us reasonable to be fearful about the accessibility of contraception in the future,” she says. 

“Precedent and the principle of stare decisis are supposed to limit judicial discretion and provide stability to the law. But time and again, as in this decision, the conservative justices are willing to overrule the precedents they dislike,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes. “They are motivated by carrying out the Republican platform, not a judicial philosophy or an interpretative methodology. The only question is how far they will go.”

California’s strict gun laws could be affected by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling striking down a New York law. The new test outlined in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen case “potentially has long-term implications for California’s other gun laws,” California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo says. 

One reason the case is so important to airlines is that they are likely to get a more pro-business outcome in the Supreme Court than with California’s lawmakers, Professor Catherine Fisk says. “The usual way of dealing with a policy disagreement is to get the legislature to enact a law,” she says. “What’s significant here is apparently the airlines couldn’t persuade the California legislature.”

Even before Roe was decided in 1973, the California Supreme Court held in 1969 that women have a fundamental right to choose whether to have children based on a right of privacy or liberty in matters related to marriage, family and sex. “The court did this interpreting ‘liberty’ in the California Constitution, just as the U.S. Supreme Court did four years later in Roe vs. Wade,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says. 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky calls the Supreme Court’s ruling that a New York gun-control law is unconstitutional “by far, the most expansive reading of the Second Amendment in American history,” and that it will put a vast number of laws regulating firearms in jeopardy. “Striking down a century-old New York law and expanding gun rights is stunning judicial activism,” he writes.

In a 6-3 ruling in the Vega v. Tekoh case, the Supreme Court held the only remedy for a Miranda violation is to block the use in court of a suspect’s incriminating comments. Professor Charles Weisselberg says he fears the decision gives police an incentive to pressure people who refuse to talk. “There will be no penalty for violating Miranda in this way,” he says. “There will be zero incentive for officers to cease questioning.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes that the U.S. House committee hearings examining the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol has convinced him the U.S. Department of Justice should bring criminal charges against Trump. “I do not minimize the difficulty of prosecuting a former president or of fairly trying one. Nor do I underestimate the risks of doing so,” writes. “But the central tenet of the rule of law is that no one is above the law, not even the president of the United States.”

Professor David Oppenheimer, faculty director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality & Anti-Discrimination Law, says the lawsuit was the “largest verdict in an individual race discrimination in employment case.”

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo discusses SCA10, which Democratic state leaders are trying to get on to the November ballot to codify abortion rights in the state. “If courts are interpreting away abortion rights at the federal level, there is the same risk a California court could interpret away California abortion rights, because SCA10 doesn’t specify what they are,” Carrillo said.

Professor Catherine Fisk says “illustrates how the companies get all the benefits of wage and price control that they would have if drivers were employees while none of the responsibility.”

 The U.S. Supreme Court “is basically cutting the establishment clause out of the Constitution,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes about the court’s holding that the state of Maine is constitutionally required to subsidize religious education when it pays for private secular education.

“Secession is clearly unconstitutional. There’s a reason the pledge of allegiance refers to ‘one nation, indivisible’,” Professor Daniel Farber says. “That’s as much true now as it was in 1865 when the South (including Texas) lost the Civil War, or 1868 when the 14th Amendment guaranteed all Americans the rights of citizenship.”

Having grown up in a poor area near the Florida-Alabama border, Bradley is relishing the chance to give back to his community.

Professor Frank Partnoy discusses why he helped start the nonpartisan, nonprofit International Institute of Law and Finance, which promotes academic research with an eye on influencing government agency rulemaking. “There’s a gap in terms of academics connecting with policymakers,” he says. 

International Human Rights Clinic Co-Director Roxanna Altholz discusses the sentencing of energy executive Roberto David Castillo in Honduras for arranging the 2016 murder of environmental activist Berta Cáceres. 

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and a co-author analyze why the Supreme Court of California has such a high rate of unanimous decisions, concluding that the court’s culture of consensus-building is largely responsible. 

Paying forward the benefits of their own Berkeley Law experience, graduates’ support helps to train top lawyers, generate leading scholarship, and uphold the school’s public mission.

Professor Khiara M. Bridges and NPR reporter Sarah McCammon answer listener questions about what a post Roe v. Wade world might look like. 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes that Republicans are using the Second Amendment as “a false fig leaf” to avoid backing new gun regulations. The U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear, he says, that the right to bear arms enshrined in the Constitution does not preclude many needed reforms. 

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and two co-authors  track the evolution of California’s abortion law in light of the impending decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. 

The Rhode Island senator joined Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and fellow Democratic Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Richard Blumenthal on an amicus brief in the West Virginia v. EPA case, which could limit the government’s ability to lower emissions at power plants. 

IHRLC co-directors Roxanna Altholz and Laurel E. Fletcher and clinical students help the Fundación Para la Justicia file a criminal complaint against the Mexican attorney general’s office for illegal surveillance, among other assistance.

Lecturer Shanin Specter says a proposal to allow the state legislature to write laws allowing lawmakers to decide the venue for civil lawsuits would increase tension between the legislative and judicial branches. “That is troubling because it seeks to upset the delicate balance among our three branches of government,” he says.