By Gwyneth K. Shaw
UC Berkeley Law has once again had a banner hiring year, adding seven new professors across a wide range of fields and disciplines to an already stellar faculty.
The seven new hires include four senior scholars — Professors Brian Galle, Joy Milligan Ph.D. ’18, Bertrall Ross, and Kevin Washburn — Assistant Professors Ryan Sakoda and Jason Ferguson, and Clinical Professor Alina Ball. They’re the latest in a transformative wave of hiring since Dean Erwin Chemerinsky arrived in 2017.
“We had a spectacular year in faculty hiring. We’ve added terrific faculty in many different fields who will be great classroom teachers as well as influential scholars,” Chemerinsky says. “We are tremendously fortunate to have them join us.”
It’s a homecoming for several: Ross and Milligan are returning after four years at the University of Virginia School of Law, Ball is an East Bay native, Ferguson got his Ph.D. in UC Berkeley’s Department of Sociology, and Sakoda was an undergraduate at the university.
“My time away helped me remember and appreciate the unique qualities associated with Berkeley Law,” Ross says. “I was drawn back because I love the people there: those who were there when I left and the many new additions I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to spend time with since I left.
“Berkeley Law tends to draw a type of person who is intellectually curious beyond the bounds of ordinary legal discussion, who is serious yet does not take themselves too seriously, who cares about the world beyond the institution, and who is generally just fun to be around.”
Others were eager to join the faculty because of the school’s storied history as a leader in many areas of legal academia and its commitment to serving the public.
“I’ve always had a warm spot in my heart for Berkeley. It’s a wonderful public law school,” says Washburn, a specialist in Indian law who counts the late Professor Philip Frickey as a mentor. After a distinguished career — including stints as law school dean at the University of Iowa and the University of New Mexico, and service as the Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Interior under President Barack Obama — the school’s public mission focus was alluring.
“I have always been a public servant in one way or the other, with my entire career in the federal government or in public law schools, and that really appealed to me,” Washburn adds. “Berkeley’s just such a strong law school.”
Here’s a look at each of these outstanding new additions.
Clinical Professor Alina Ball
Ball, who started at the law school in January, leads the new Social Enterprise Clinic in the growing Clinical Program, which will enroll its first students this fall. They’ll work as outside counsel for local businesses with a social or environmental mission, assisting with corporate governance, regulatory compliance, formation issues, and contract drafting.
“This is an opportunity to build on the work that I’ve been doing over the last decade, but now I can take that to a deeper level,” says Ball, who ran a similar clinic at UC Law San Francisco.
Ball’s career as a clinical professor grew out of her passion for two distinct areas: transactional law and racial justice. She went to UCLA Law knowing she wanted to do transactional work in economically marginalized communities.
“Lawyers have been doing this type of work for a really long time, but there weren’t ready made pathways to how to do this — there wasn’t a how-to guide of how to be a transactional social justice lawyer,” she says.
Ball worked at Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., focusing on representing private and public companies in debt, equity, and M&A transactions. She then got a teaching fellowship at Georgetown Law, where she also earned an LL.M.
“I realized this is the sweet spot of the technical skills that I wanted to use and the ability to work within the communities where I’m most inspired,” Ball says. “My two guiding principles have always been a desire to use the technical skills that allow me to do creative problem solving within communities that I deeply care about and authenticity — really making sure that I’m able to live my values in the work that I’m doing.”
Assistant Professor Jason Ferguson
Ferguson will teach and advise students in the law school’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program (JSP), which he calls “one of the most unique Ph.D.-granting programs in the country” and a big draw for him.
“When I was a Ph.D. student, I was fortunate enough to learn about this extraordinary interdisciplinary program in law and society housed inside the law school,” says Ferguson, who spent four years at UCLA and last year at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
“Both JSP and the affiliated Center for the Study of Law and Society were major resources for me and played an important role in my turn toward the critical study of law in context and law in action,” he adds. “I look forward to taking advantage of the multidisciplinary environment and the fruitful intellectual exchanges with colleagues across the law school.”
Ferguson, whose research mines the intersection of the sociology of law, neo-institutional theory, political sociology, and global and transnational studies, joins a strong lineup of sociologists on the law school faculty. He uses statistical, archival, interviewing, and ethnographic methods to analyze a range of social phenomena, including the structure and evolution of laws regulating sexuality. Theoretically, his work considers the underappreciated role of sexuality as an axis of social and national distinction.
He also champions less conventional, relational statistical methods such as Multiple Correspondence Analysis, the method of choice of the late renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
JSP and the broader institution is an ideal place to further his research, Ferguson says.
“In my scholarship and teaching, I seek to marry sustained engagement with social theory and methodologically rigorous empirical research,” he says. “I’m positive this exciting intellectual environment will open up new vistas for my scholarship and bring my work to new audiences.”
Professor Brian Galle
A tax law expert, Galle says he’s looking forward to being in the middle of UC Berkeley’s campus, where he can engage with “an incredible set of law colleagues” as well as scholars from the university’s Department of Economics, which is consistently ranked among the best in the country. He holds a J.D. from Columbia and earned an LL.M. from Georgetown, where he later taught for a decade, and has also taught at Boston College and Florida State.
“It’s an amazing opportunity to be at not only one of the world’s great universities, but one which happens to have probably one of the handful of the best tax economics departments in the world, as well as one of the leading departments of behavioral economics,” he says. “Being right there and able to walk and get a coffee, go to an economics workshop, then come back and teach your class seems pretty awesome.”
Galle will teach courses in federal income taxation and corporate tax law and policy, and hopes to attract students who’ve already taken Mergers & Acquisitions to fill out their knowledge. He hopes to continue teaching a course covering nonprofit organizations and a seminar he calls Law and Economics of the Public Sector, which takes a public finance economics concept and ties it to some legal controversy.
Galle co-authored a study with UC Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez examining California’s recent wealth tax proposals and is currently at work on a monograph called “How to Tax the Rich” — a salient topic given the giant tax package recently passed in Congress and signed by President Donald Trump.
“This bill will create a gigantic fiscal mess, and greatly enrich the Americans who are already the richest,” Galle says. “So how do we get out of that? We raise a lot of money, probably from those people.
“The book is about how to do that, efficiently and legally.”
Professor Joy Milligan
Milligan was a UC Berkeley Law professor from 2017 to 2021 and earned her Ph.D. from JSP, so she knows the school and many of her colleagues deeply.
“Sometimes you have to go away to come home again,” she says. “I’ve always been in awe of the intellectual community that is Berkeley Law. Many of my intellectual mentors and the people I admire most are the faculty that I get to be colleagues with now. “
Milligan, a former civil rights lawyer who holds a J.D. from NYU, shifted to teaching constitutional law at Virginia. Her scholarship has moved in a parallel direction, expanding from civil rights and legal history to constitutional theory. In the coming academic year, she will be on sabbatical and working on a book with Ross, Democracy and the Constitution: Addressing the Legacy of Exclusion. She and Ross are Steven M. Polan Fellows in Constitutional Law and History, a program run by the Brennan Center for Justice to extend theory and debate regarding constitutional history beyond originalism.
“It’s been fun to start that new line of both teaching and research,” Milligan says. “I continue to be primarily focused on civil rights law and racial inequality, but in the last couple of years, I’ve spent more time on questions of repair and legal remedies for the racial regimes of the past than doing as much legal history.
“Our project centers on the question of how we live with and interpret and govern ourselves with a Constitution that wasn’t really written for all of us, so it very much dovetails nicely with the broader kind of histories I’ve always been interested in.”
Milligan is also at work on a sweeping history of how the 20th Century federal administrative state grappled with and often reinforced Jim Crow in employment, farming, housing, education, and beyond.
At Berkeley, Milligan will take on a new role as co-director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality & Antidiscrimination Law. She will join founding director Professor David Oppenheimer, who began the center in 2010 and has grown it to a global network of over 1,000 academics, advocates, and activists researching and collaborating on equality law and policy. The project is close to her heart, since she participated as a graduate student at the center’s founding.
“I can’t wait to work with David on this critical project, building on all that he’s done to nurture a thriving, immense network of equality law practitioners and scholars,” she says.
Professor Bertrall Ross
Once Ross returns to the campus next fall, he has a list of things he’s looking forward to doing again: Walking the halls, chatting with students and colleagues in offices or Café Zeb, attending faculty workshops, and more.
“I am excited about plotting with students and my colleagues on how to address the critical issues we confront as a country. I am excited to step in the classroom and be challenged and pushed by my students as I hopefully open their minds to thinking about things in a way that they hadn’t before,” he says. “I am excited — and I know this sounds strange — for faculty meetings, because even though we all complain about them and even though they can be a bit much, there is something quite special and unique about gatherings to engage questions about our collective institution.”
Ross will also take on a new challenge, as co-director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy with Professor Daniel A. Farber. Founded in fall 2024 after the death of the law school’s beloved former dean, and national political and policy influence for decades, the center aims to defend and strengthen democratic institutions in the United States through actionable research and public leadership.
The center recently hired renowned public service lawyer Catherine E. Lhamon to serve as its executive director.
The position “means so much to me, given how pivotal a figure Chris Edley was for my early career,” Ross says. “He was the dean who hired me and in his own unique way, he was the dean that pushed me to believe that I belonged. I am excited to work with Dan Farber, Catherine Lhamon, students, and other collaborators to address the many challenges that democracy is currently facing and to carry on Chris’s legacy as a social justice advocate.”
In addition to his project with Milligan, Ross is at work on three other books, including one already accepted for publication that exposes how political campaigns’ reliance on data-driven strategies contributes to a persistent turnout gap between the wealthy and the poor with consequences that are far-reaching.
Assistant Professor Ryan Sakoda
Sakoda, who comes to UC Berkeley Law from Iowa, grew up in California and got two undergraduate degrees at UC Berkeley before earning a J.D. from Yale and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. He was also a Fulbright Scholar, a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine, and a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago, and worked in the Boston public defender’s office as a Liman Public Interest Fellow and later as a staff attorney.
An empirical researcher of crime and criminal justice policy, Sakoda dovetails with the law school’s deep bench of data-driven researchers, particularly those using the economist’s toolbox.
“There is so much that excites me about joining Berkeley Law,” Sakoda says. “The faculty has an incredible scope and depth of expertise, and I look forward to working with and learning from all of my new colleagues.
“I’m particularly excited about collaborating with our criminal law faculty as well as our faculty working at the intersection of law and the social sciences.”
Sakoda’s research examines how the government’s enforcement of criminal punishment affects individual outcomes and systemic inequalities, and includes articles on probation, post-release supervision, and solitary confinement. He’s currently studying legal representation in criminal cases and has pursued research related to access to justice more generally and how interventions in other areas of law can impact persistent socioeconomic inequality.
He’ll teach Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure – Investigations, and a course on empirical studies on the criminal legal system.
“I have heard great things about the Berkeley Law students, and I am incredibly excited to teach and learn from them. I look forward to many engaging conversations in class and office hours digging into the various issues surrounding the criminal legal system,” Sakoda says. “I feel a very strong connection to the university and the UC system as a whole.
“I am so excited to return to Berkeley and teach at the university that I love.”
Professor Kevin Washburn
Washburn is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, and his research focuses on federal policy related to Indian tribes, particularly in the areas of expanding tribal sovereignty and tribal self-determination. Early in his academic career, he helped shepherd the 2010 Tribal Law and Order Act, which restored felony criminal justice authority to tribes and helped build momentum in Congress for the tribal provisions in the Violence Against Women Act reauthorizations in 2013 and 2022.
More recently, he’s turned to tribal conservation and co-management of federal public lands, and an ambitious new path trying to identify the reasons why tribes pay higher interest rates than municipal governments or corporations when they issue bonds to finance development projects.
“After pulling a lot of threads, I have come to believe that a significant aspect of the problem relates to federal laws governing securities, bankruptcy, taxes, and Indian law and Indian gaming,” Washburn says. “While there is at least one key economic reason for the risk premium, the largest factors contributing to the higher costs for tribes are the way these laws treat tribal governments.”
In addition to its public mission push, Washburn was drawn to UC Berkeley Law by its robust — and growing — commitment to recruiting and training students of Native American and Indigenous descent. Professor Seth Davis helped revive the school’s Native American Law Students Association chapter and founded the Center for Indigenous Law & Justice, which hired Merri Lopez-Keifer as its first executive director earlier this year.
Under the leadership of Chief Administrative Office Kristin Theis-Alvarez, then dean of admissions and financial aid, the school began supplementing UC Berkeley’s Native American Opportunity Plan to make law school more affordable for in-state students enrolled in federally recognized Native American, American Indian, and Alaska Native tribes.
Washburn says he recently went to the largest annual Indian law conference and there were 16 UC Berkeley Law students there, the most of any law school.
“That commitment was huge, because I want to be around students who are interested in what I do and interested in pursuing a career in that area,” he says. “I knew that Seth and Kristin were there, and they’re both wonderful, committed people, but I learned that they were the tip of the iceberg in terms of nice people doing great things at Berkeley — it seems to be full of them.”