By Andrew Cohen
Renowned professors of law Eric Talley and Jonathan Simon ’87 have been awarded faculty chairs at Berkeley Law.
Talley, a corporate law expert and faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business, is the first holder of the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Chair. He teaches courses on corporate finance, contracts, and law and economics. Earlier this year, Talley was one of two risk-analysis experts tapped by the Congressional Oversight Panel to review the U.S. Treasury Department’s methodology in its stress tests of America’s 19 largest bank holding companies.
His chair was funded by the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation, of which Martin Blank ’66 is a co-director. The foundation invests in programs that promote education, tolerance, social services, the State of Israel, healthcare, and the arts.
Simon, associate dean of the law school’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program and faculty co-chair of the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice, will occupy the Adrian A. Kragen Professorship of Law Chair. He teaches courses on criminal law, criminal justice, risk and the law, and socio-legal studies. His scholarship focuses on the role of criminal justice and punishment in modern societies, insurance and other contemporary practices of governing risk, and the intellectual history of law and the social sciences.
Simon’s chair honors the late Adrian Kragen ’34, a tax law expert who taught at Berkeley Law from 1952 to 1994 and also served as UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor from 1960 to 1964. Kragen’s former students paid tribute to his contributions by joining with other friends, family, and colleagues in spearheading a drive to endow an honorary chair that would perpetuate his name.
“Eric and Jonathan are examples of the exciting talent we have in the middle generation of Berkeley Law faculty,” says Dean Christopher Edley, Jr. “Superb teachers, scholars with a global audience, engaging questions that matter not just to academic colleagues but to the broader society. Having endowed chairs to bestow lets us recognize their achievements, but also lets the entire law school community celebrate our values.”