“The crucial question will be whether it serves as a check on President Trump or just a rubber stamp approving his actions,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School.
“Like last year, this term the Supreme Court again will face issues that arise from the culture wars and the Trump presidency that deeply divide our country,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.
The Supreme Court “has been a rubber stamp approving Trump’s actions,” said UC Berkeley law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “I hope very much that the court will be a check on Trump. There isn’t any other. But so far, it has not played that role.”
“Beyond the unconstitutional aspects of the compact, there is its odious demand to intrude on the autonomy of these schools,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Every aspect of it seeks to dictate decisions that have traditionally been left to each university — a degree of control over higher education that is characteristic of authoritarian countries.”
“There’s always the impulse to punish speech we don’t like,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But the First Amendment protects all speech. Once you open this door, it could set a very dangerous precedent. What about teachers who criticize Donald Trump?”
“Judges are free to use their opinions to comment on the law and larger issues, as long as the focus of the opinion is right,” said Fogel, who now directs the Berkeley Judicial Institute at UC Berkeley Law. “Legal opinions are not usually that exciting. He was trying to say, this is really important.”
“I’m tremendously worried,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. “Using the military for domestic law enforcement is something that’s characteristic of authoritarian regimes.”
For Jeremy Fogel, a former federal trial judge in California and executive director, Berkeley Judicial Institute, increasing the focus on judicial well-being is a project decades in the making.
“In all my decades spent closely following Supreme Court decisions, I’ve never before felt one term had the potential to be so momentous in deciding the future of American democracy,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.
While still a law student, Ahern developed an innovative calculation tool that eliminates tedious manual work and fuels faster, more reliable decisions that instill greater confidence.
Former acting Labor Secretary Julie Su will be a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where she will focus her work at the university’s Center for Law and Work.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, said “no one will object” if the White House simply requires universities to pledge compliance with existing law.
Su, who served in the Brown, Newsom, and Biden administrations, says she’s excited to be at the law school because “there is so much good that law students and lawyers can do in the world, especially in this moment.”
“AB 288 protects fundamental constitutional rights of Californians at a time when the federal government is failing,” writes Professor Catherine Fisk and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It is a commonsense measure that builds on the established practice enabling unions and employers to come together under a stable and predictable set of rules to bargain collectively.”
A $6 million gift from Bob and Colleen Haas will establish the Thelton E. Henderson ’62 Chair in Civil Rights Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.
Mike Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the UC Berkeley School of Law, said the need is about to explode with the advent of artificial Intelligence. “The data centers that we see now will just multiply,” he said. “And their need to cool their servers will multiply along with them.”
“It’s unnecessary to do what the administration is doing now, unless one is operating like a mob boss,” said UC Berkeley Law’s Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy, Catherine E. Lhamon.
Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the UC Berkeley School of Law, said requiring data on water use is a good first step, but local officials may not know what to do with that number alone.
“Change in the Supreme Court is always difficult,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But in recent years, the justices have altered how they conduct oral arguments, and they now have audio broadcasts of arguments. It is time for them to go much further in providing transparency and openness.”
Claudia Polsky, a UC Berkeley law professor and the attorney for the researchers in the case, said the ruling is a victory for academic study as well as freedom of thought.
“This ruling in researchers’ favor is very consequential in this moment when the Trump Administration is applying maximum political pressure to UCLA,” said Claudia Polsky, director of the environmental law clinic at UC Berkeley and an attorney for the plaintiffs. “The effect of reinstating all unlawfully suspended NIH grants to UCLA would be to give campus and the regents the leverage they need to resist and to uphold the rule of law.”
UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said, “It’s an astounding position that the government is taking, that people’s constitutional rights can be violated.”
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, said Carr’s actions were part of a broad assault on free speech by the administration, which “is showing a stunning ignorance and disregard of the 1st amendment.”
“I believe courts could conclude that there is no reasonable need for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents to be wearing masks other than in the exceptions provided in the bill,” Chemerinsky said. And although the legal challenges to SB627 will pose some “unprecedented” legal questions, he said, courts have allowed states to enforce their laws against federal officers despite challenges by the federal government.
“It’s understandable that those in power want to silence the speech that they don’t like, but the whole point of the 1st Amendment is to protect speech we don’t like,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “We don’t need the 1st Amendment to protect the speech we like.”
“This is wonderful news for UC researchers and should be tremendously consequential in ongoing UC negotiations with the Trump administration,” said Claudia Polsky, a UC Berkeley law professor who is part of the legal team behind the suit.
“It’s important that the state take a stand,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It’s obviously not a slam dunk because there are arguments on both sides, but that’s often the case with the law.”
“It is time to be very worried about freedom of expression in the United States,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “History shows that it can be so easily lost. No democracy can exist without it.”
To Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of U.C. Berkeley School of Law, lines were clearly crossed. “The government, including the FCC, never can impose sanctions for the views expressed,” he says. “But that is exactly what Carr threatened and ABC capitulated.”
“You can’t advertise something if you know — or should know — that what you are saying isn’t true,” said Ted Mermin. executive director, Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice. “You do not need a law that’s called ‘the tequila purity law.'”
One of the youngest students to graduate from UC Berkeley Law, Cheung created a LinkedIn group for the school’s LL.M. alumni and earned all three available certificates of specialization.
“The Supreme Court has greatly reduced the power of the federal courts,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “And it has done so at a time when the federal judiciary may be our only guardrail to protect the Constitution and democracy.”
Catherine Crump, a clinical professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, said messaging and social media platforms have a virtual “ironclad immunity” from the content made by its users under Sec. 230. She noted that the law has long been viewed as out of date — artificial intelligence and algorithms to monitor speech or content, she noted, did not exist when it was passed — but the platforms are protected from their own content until an act of Congress makes changes.
“I think he [Trump] is chilling dissent,” says Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at University of California, Berkeley and a specialist in US constitutional law. “That’s where the analogy of the McCarthy era comes in.”
Trump is “very much wanting to use the tools of the government to try to silence the speech that he doesn’t like,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and a leading First Amendment scholar. “It’s not a new playbook for people to use power in that way, but we’ve never seen a president do anything like this before.”
“No democracy lasts forever,” said Dean Chemerinsky. “We all know countries in the world that were democracies and are no longer. And I believe that in this moment OUR democracy is in a more serious threat than it has ever faced in all of American history.”
Comparing the month before the inauguration to the month of July, arrests of people with no criminal charges or convictions across the country have gone up about ten times, said David Hausman, an assistant professor at Berkeley Law and the director of the project, a repository of ICE data collected largely via FOIA request.
“The Supreme Court’s growing reliance on its “shadow docket” to issue major, often precedent-shaping rulings without full briefing, oral argument, or explanation undermines fundamental principles of judicial process and transparency,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.
“When you collect this data, it’s really hard to control,” said Catherine Crump, director of UC Berkeley’s Technology & Public Policy Clinic. “It’s no different from once you share your data with Meta or Google, they’re going to repackage your data and sell it to advertisers and you don’t have any idea which of the advertising companies have your data.”
Dean Erwin Chemerinsky weighs in on the Supreme Court’s recent ruling upholding raids by ICE agents in Los Angeles and other cities, targeting people based on their skin color and accents.
Daniel Farber, the author of “Contested Ground: How To Understand the Limits of Presidential Power,” says one avenue members could take would be to try to coerce Mr. Trump by refusing to confirm his appointees or to fund something he wants until he enforces the law. “It’s true that the president has the right to prioritize laws, but that doesn’t mean that he can simply decide that he doesn’t like some laws and is not going to enforce them at all.”
Duncan described his relentless efforts while incarcerated to learn about the law and use it to pursue justice for himself and hundreds of fellow prisoners.
