Media Highlights

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?”

“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 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 First Amendment may limit state regulation of projections, however,” Seth Davis, a professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, told SFGATE. “It may protect a right to project statements on buildings in some cases. For example, the First Amendment may protect a right to project a political statement on a building when that statement is connected to the building.” 

“This will reinforce concerns that the banking industry already has, and also concerns that major investors have, about the fossil-fuel industry and whether it’s a good investment,” Berkeley Law professor Dan Farber told Al Jazeera. “So I think this definitely puts pressure on them, the longer these cases stick around.”

“There are lots of cases involving workers who work somewhat autonomously who have nevertheless successfully unionized,” said Catherine Fisk, professor of labor law at UC Berkeley School of Law.

UC Berkeley law Professor Emily Zhang believes that many people impacted by Prop. 17 are unaware that they are newly eligible to vote. “A law changing can only do so much. There’s the second part, which is to make sure people know about the law,” Zhang said. 

“I’ve looked at some of the language in the executive agreements. It’s totally baseless for [Musk] to seek termination with cause,” said Adam Badawi, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. “To get terminated with cause, the circumstances have to be extreme, they have to kind of be malfeasance or someone did something illegal. 

University of California at Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk discusses how the WARN Act may apply to the layoffs at Twitter.

Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean at UC Berkeley who has argued a number of cases before the Supreme Court, said he doesn’t think Thomas needs to remove himself from cases in which his wife is part of an organization that supports one of the parties, unless that organization is actually a party to the case. 

Megan Graham, supervising attorney at the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at University of California Berkeley School of Law comments on the affidavit Santa Rosa Police used to secure a search warrant on Vice Mayor Eddie Alvarez.

David A. Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at UC Berkeley School of Law discusses the California’s Proposition 1.

“What provokes the case is long-standing community dissatisfaction with BAAQMD which has not listened to the community,” said Steve Castleman, a clinical supervising attorney for Berkeley’s Environmental Law Clinic. “This is a long-standing problem with especially low-income and minority communities like those around AB&I in East Oakland.”

University of California, Berkeley law professor John Yoo discusses The U.S. Supreme Court’s race related cases.

“Lowell claimed 1920s Jewish quota was intended to increase diversity by avoiding concentrations of Northeastern city dwellers,” writes David B. Oppenheimer, law professor at Berkeley Law and James N. Bierman, a former assistant dean of admissions at Harvard Law School and a lawyer in the District of Columbia. “As the Supreme Court plans to take up affirmative action, his policies are being cited in an effort to keep Black and Latino students out of Harvard.”

“Either Harvard needs to take a hard look at cultural bias in its admissions process, or Asian applicants to Harvard need to spend less of their scarce time on academics and more on personality development,” writes Prasad Krishnamurthy, professor of law at U.C. Berkeley School of Law.

“The long history of racial discrimination in America and current inequalities in educational opportunity make affirmative action essential,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “Affirmative action works.”

“The last 3 years have been the driest 3 year period on record,” said Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute.

David A. Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at UC Berkeley School of Law discusses the California Supreme Court.

Dean Chemerinsky discusses the Supreme Court’s six Republican-appointed justices and weighs in on who is the conservative wing’s true leader.

Lecturer Shanin Specter discusses Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman.

Dean Chemerinsky’s opinion on Propostion 1 is cited in an article on the California gubernatorial debate. UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky told The Chronicle in September, “ I think that the clear intent is to protect current law, which protects abortions until viability. It does not create an absolute right to abortion; just as other rights in the state Constitution are not absolute.”

Dean Chemerinsky discusses whether the Interstate Commerce Clause restricts states from regulating in-state conduct that has a substantial impact on mostly out-of-state producers.

“It is now necessary for us to consider options that would, in previous generations, be considered unthinkable,” said Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute.

“Where once there were forests and fields and wetlands that would soak up the rain, these have been paved over and replaced with surfaces that do not absorb rain,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute. Those are hard materials like concrete sidewalks, asphalt roads, and roofs, which funnel runoff into gutters, storm drains, and sewers. 

“I can understand why smaller players wouldn’t want to be grouped with Meta,” said Andrew Bradt, professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. “Meta is the 800-pound gorilla, and the fear of guilt by association is understandable. On the other hand, I didn’t find their argument [about] the individualized nature of the applications persuasive at all. There are obvious efficiencies to be gained through centralized pretrial proceedings here, and I think the panel did the right thing.” 

Dean Chemerinsky discusses California’s Proposition 1, the ballot measure to add abortion rights directly into the state Constitution.

UC Berkeley law professor Ian Haney López’s comment to the New York Times about the current political and partisan state of play among Hispanic voters going into the 2022 elections is cited in Harold Meyerson’s OpEd.

Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment and Daniel Farber, law professor at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment discuss a proposal by the Biden administration to require all states to track and reduce on-road vehicle greenhouse gas emissions.

“Not remotely a surprise,” tweeted Orin Kerr, a criminal law professor at the University of California’s Berkeley Law and former Supreme Court law clerk. “Still, it’s good not to be surprised.”

“It was stunning that it was her second day of oral arguments as a justice,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law. “No one was more active in questioning. I also had the sense in that case that she was very conscious of her role as a Black justice and the importance of being a voice against discrimination and for remedies.”

“As with white voters, the most important predictors of support for Republicans track racial resentment as well as anxiety over racial status, Ian Haney López, law professor at the University of California, Berkeley tells columnist Thomas B. Edsall. “Rather than an ideological sorting, we are witnessing a racial sorting among Latinos — not in terms of anything so simple as skin color, but rather, in terms of those who seek a higher status for themselves by more closely identifying on racial grounds with the white mainstream, versus those who give less priority to race, or even see Latinos as a nonwhite racial group.”

UC Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges was a guest speaker at the inaugural Berkeleyside Idea Makers event where she spoke about the movement for reproductive justice and the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson.

“Last term showed six conservative justices who have a very conservative agenda for the law and are aggressively implementing it,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. “I think we’ll see that again this year.”

Lecturer Shanin Specter and attorney Robert A. Clifford write in their OpEd, “Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has imposed $201 million in fines against Boeing and its CEO for misleading investors about the safety of the planes involved. However, there is still a need for criminal investigations into Boeing CEOs Dennis Muilenburg and David Calhoun.”

“If Hastings’ family had a contract with the state, as shown in a document from 1878 with signatures from both sides, it might still be a binding agreement that could not be changed by future legislation,”said David A. Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at UC Berkeley School of Law and is not involved in the court case. “But if there is no such document, Carrillo said, the Legislature that passed the 1878 law ‘cannot bind the hands of a future Legislature.'”

“The absence of drama around the California court arguably shows that it better reflects California society, and the rancor on the U.S. Supreme Court and political arguments about reforming that court suggest that it is misaligned with society at large,” said David Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at UC Berkeley Law School.

UC Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges discusses what’s at stake for Black communities following the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. 

Dean Chemerinsky joins host Kimberly Atkins Stohr to discuss the Supreme Court’s new term.

“If you trespass on a football field, with huge men who tackle people for a living,” said Andrew Bradt, professor of law at UC Berkeley, “it’s probably foreseeable that you’re gonna get tackled by a huge person.”

“Generally, I think these sort of subnational statements are important, politically and symbolically, because they can help push national governments to more on climate action,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

“It’s clear that the conservative justices regard race discrimination in voting as a thing of the past and therefore seek to limit or eliminate the Voting Rights Act,” said Dean Chemerinsky. “If the court follows this path, it will further limit protections against race discrimination in our electoral system.”

“The court is not going to save us. It is going to let Trump do whatever he wants to do. And it’s going to help him get away with it,” said Professor Khiara M. Bridges in response to the court’s decision on Trump v. Hawaii.

“As the Supreme Court begins its new term on Monday, it’s clear that the court’s majority is determined to move the law much further to the right.” writes Dean Chemerinsky.

Dean Chemerinsky discusses the Supreme Court.

“The October 2021 term was one of the most momentous in history: The court overruled Roe v. Wade, greatly expanded gun rights, aggressively protected free exercise of religion and significantly limited administrative agency power”, Dean Chemerinsky writes. “There is no doubt that the coming term, too, will be filled with blockbuster decisions.”  

Dean Chemerinsky discusses the Supreme Court’s upcoming term.

“Ideally, you’d see … the Public Utilities Commission, the Air Resources Board and the Energy Commission having a real unified strategy on this, with a clear end date” for natural gas use, said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. That hasn’t happened, at least not publicly, he said, but “you’re starting to see it piecemeal.”

“California state law might be more amenable to facts that suggest a business who put products on Amazon felt that they couldn’t offer their products on rival platforms,” said UC Berkeley School of Law professor Prasad Krishnamurthy.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment discusses regulations to
ban the sale of diesel trucks by 2040. 

Dean Chemerinsky discusses the impact of the recent Supreme Court rulings. “At this point in time, the court is ideologically divided the same way our society is divided,” said Chemerinsky. 

Jonathan Glater, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said that the government’s options for dealing with schools’ misconduct had never been “prophylactic — they operate after the fact.”

“If Congress adopts a law prohibiting abortions, that would pre-empt state laws to the contrary,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the UC Berkeley law school dean.

Lecturer Shanin Specter answers medical malpractice questions.

Professor Khiara M. Bridges discusses the “period pill.”

Lecturer Shanin Specter commented “The recent indication of agreement to one debate in late October may be seen by voters as too little and too late, especially for those who vote by mail,” said Mr. Specter, who donates to candidates in both parties.

“Once you say that it is an ‘unborn human being,’ then it’s a short step to saying that laws allowing abortion are unconstitutional because they deny equal protection to those persons that are unborn human beings,” said Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. 

David A. Carrillo, executive director of Berkeley Law’s California Constitution center, said adding abortion rights to California’s constitution would give Attorney General Rob Bonta a “major new weapon to combat Congressional overreach.”

Interview with Dean Erwin Chemerinsky on his new book, “Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism.”  

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, discusses how California will manage an increased demand on the electric grid with persistent heat waves and increased sales of EVs.

Andrea Roth, a Berkeley Law professor whose research focuses on the use of forensic science in criminal trials notes that some “biometric” techniques had their beginnings in racism or eugenics to try to identify “criminal” or “abnormal” biological attributes. The man sometimes called the father of fingerprinting, Sir Francis Galton, is known for being an unapologetic racist, among other examples, Roth added.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law discusses his new book “Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism.”

Dean Chemerinsky writes, originalism is in its ascendancy on the Supreme Court. In case after case in the last term, the conservative justices based their decisions on their cramped reading of American history.

Originalism is primarily about how courts should interpret the Constitution, writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. That leads to an obvious threshold question: How did the Framers intend the courts to do this?

“If a judge can tell a different branch of government, ‘I’m taking over your job,’ then how does the executive branch function?” said Orin Kerr, a University of California, Berkeley law professor and an expert on criminal procedure.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, discusses how to manage an increased demand on the electric grid as sales of EVs increases.

Voters should see through the “reform” sham to the truth: Recalls have little to do with hyperpartisanship, and under cover of reforming the recall, the Legislature is stripping power from voters, write David A. Carrillo and Joshua Spivak of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law.

Alexa Koenig, executive director of Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and a lecturer at the law and journalism schools along with three other Berkeley experts discuss the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and what it reveals about the changing nature of the court, and what lawmakers are likely to do next.

The legislature is trying to say “look, we did reform the recall,” but what this really means is “sucks to be you, general law cities,” say Stephen M. Duvernay and Joshua Spivak of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law

“Housing policy often gets lost in climate discussions, but this is actually one of the best ways that we can reduce emissions,” said Ethan Elkind, a law professor and climate expert at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, discusses California’s plans to phase out sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes The California Legislature should strengthen the Racial Justice Act, passed two years ago to discourage racial bias in sentencing. He says a bill on the Senate floor would do just that, but it still needs work.

“This legislation will show that you can actually do this without causing the economy to collapse,” said Catherine Fisk, faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Work and the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. “And so I think there’s nowhere to go but up from here.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, said that at this point, almost any new gun control law is subject to a constitutional challenge.

“There is much to celebrate,” write Professor Jonathan D. Glater and co-author UC Irvine School of Law Professor Dalié Jiménez. “And then there is the big picture, which remains grim. This mass cancellation – politically unimaginable just five years ago – is not the end of the student loan crisis.”

Savala Nolan, executive director of the Center for Social Justice writes that Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan doesn’t do enough for black Americans. “I don’t begrudge anybody having their loans forgiven under this new policy even if I won’t get relief; I do, however, lament the administration’s failure to properly weigh the role that wealth plays, or should play, in student loan forgiveness. I mean wealth as distinct from income–wealth meaning assets that can be passed from generation to generation.”

California historically leads the way regarding emissions due to a carve-out in the US Clean Air Act, according to Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at UC Berkeley Law. It is the only state in the US that can make emissions standard mandates beyond the federal government’s. But the law also permits other US states to adopt California’s standards without the federal government’s approval, Elkind said.

“The danger of this type of case is that a court might be drawn, by the artistic nature of the product at issue, to favor 1st Amendment and artistic expression concerns over consumer protection concerns,” said Ted Mermin, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice. “But on a common sense level, [we] know that if we are buying an album that is marketed as being the songs of Michael Jackson, it had better have the songs of Michael Jackson.”

“It’s easy to believe that locking people up for longer periods of time makes us safer,” write Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, former Los Angeles County district attorney Gil Garcetti, and Miriam Aroni Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution. “But there is no evidence that extreme sentences improve public safety.”

David A. Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center, says diversifying the court first became a priority under former Gov. Jerry Brown in the 1970s. “Doing so is crucial to both the perception and the reality that those who administer justice reflect the state’s diversity,” Carrillo says. “The judge in my case doesn’t have to look like me, but it shouldn’t be true that there are no judges who look like me.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo discuss the nomination. “This is two-sevenths of the California Supreme Court, and these are people who are going to be there for a long time,” Chemerinsky says. “They are historic and important appointments.” Guerrero’s appointment also makes sense politically, Carrillo says, as appointing the first Latina chief justice “speaks directly to the nearly 40% of the California population with Hispanic ancestry.”

“The Electoral Count Reform Act is a major and necessary step forward. The perfect cannot be allowed to be the enemy of the good,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and co-authors Laurence H. Tribe and Dennis Aftergut write of the legislation now under consideration in Congress. “But given the reality of the election-denying officials and battleground state legislature majorities, Congress should not allow the good that the current reform measure achieves to potentially be swallowed by state representatives who would enact undemocratic power grabs that all of us, including our federal legislators, might wish we didn’t have to see.”

Fractional trading brokerages like Robinhood, meanwhile, are “a fly in the ointment,” to Buffett, says Professor Robert Bartlett, who co-authored a new study finding volumes of the most expensive stock in the U.S. have been artificially inflated by the way brokers like Robinhood report fractional trading. “Buffett wants to keep the price of his Class A shares high to attract long-term value investors. Those aren’t the people buying these fractional shares, and so they are undermining his main vision for the stock.”

“Senate Bill 1149 would create a presumption against secrecy in civil litigation in cases involving a defective product or environmental hazard that ‘has caused or is likely to cause significant or substantial bodily injury or illness or death,'” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes of legislation now under consideration in Sacramento. “This is a commonsense and long-overdue reform.”

“The proposal before the Senate represents an excellent beginning. It must be strengthened to protect democracy in the final stages of selecting a president. But it’s equally vital to remember that not even a perfect way of counting the electoral votes at the tail end of the process can overcome unfair and undemocratic obstacles to casting ballots at the front end,” write Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, Harvard Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe, and former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut. “Our democracy will not be secure until we enact broader protection for voting rights.”

“One thing that might have triggered this wave of litigation is that cities have become aware in the past 15 years that climate change is costing them money,” Professor Holly Doremus says. “That’s especially true for coastal cities, counties and states, where a lot of these cases are coming from. I think just looking for any way to deal with this problem has sent them to the state courts.”

David A. Carrillo and Brandon V. Stracener of the California Constitution Center write that if proposed state laws copying the citizen enforcement mechanism of Texas’ S.B. 8 survive, one might eventually turn up on the ballot as an initiative, posing “a grave threat to a minority group, who will fail to defeat the proposition because (as a minority) they lack the votes.” 

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, discusses the challenges for California’s planned route from San Francisco to Los Angeles. 

“If there is a stable source of funding both for wildfire and EVs, then you create the ability to plan in a more profound way,” says Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, of the debate over Proposition 30, which would  raise income taxes on people earning more than $2 million a year to fund zero-emission vehicle purchases and infrastructure.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses Gorsuch’s role in closely-divided cases this term. 

“It’s ridiculous to think that we should look to the laws of 1791 and 1868 to ascertain whether there should be a right to public prayer or abortion.” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the mindset governing the flurry of recent decisions from the conservative-dominated court. “It’s highly doubtful that we would even want to follow certain practices enshrined in the Constitution.”

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo is among those quoted to analyze Gov. Gavin Newsom’s next move. Elevating a sitting justice gives the governor “the appearance of making two appointments: one to elevate a new Chief Justice, and one to fill the vacated seat,” Carrillo says.

“In recent years the California Supreme Court has coalesced into a group of moderate justices who decide nearly 90% of their cases unanimously, and Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye’s retirement may be an inflection point for that dynamic,” California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo says. “So one factor in choosing a new Chief Justice is how likely that person is to continue the court’s current consensus culture.”

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, says it’s safe to assume that the historic commute patterns likely will never fully return to what they were before the pandemic, so transit providers will need to find other ways to attract more riders. “I think it’s going to be really hard to get back to that level of ridership unless you grow the overall pie,” he says. “Their best strategy is making sure there are more apartments and office buildings right next to transit. If people live really close to a transit stop they’re going to be much more likely to ride that to get where they want to go for recreational activities or for work.”

“The new California law, like the Texas law, limits how a defendant can challenge its provisions in court, but it is not immune from review in the courts,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes of new legislation which authorizes private citizens to file civil suits against gun makers and sellers in three circumstances and is based on Texas’ law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. “Once challenged, courts should uphold the regulations as reasonable and consistent with the Second Amendment.”

The authors of the Constitution “believed the Bill of Rights wasn’t creating rights but was recognizing rights that were already out there,” says Professor Daniel Farber, author of Retained by the People, a 2007 book about the Ninth Amendment. The current court’s majority “has basically ignored” that amendment, he says, most likely because “it looks like a wide-open invitation and it doesn’t really say anything about how you decide what’s covered.”

“It’s said that a society is measured by how we treat the worst among us, the most marginalized, the most despised,” Death Penalty Clinic Co-Director Elisabeth Semel tells columnist Nicholas Goldberg. “The law applies to everybody. We don’t get to pick and choose.” 

The best efforts standard is vague and can be difficult to gauge, Professor Adam Badawi says, and establishing that someone has breached a best efforts obligation requires pretty extreme conduct. “You can’t hook someone up to a machine and figure out how much they’re trying,” he says. 

“This data tracking is…it means that people who are pregnant and seeking access to medical care (are) extraordinarily vulnerable to having their data sold to vigilantes as well as provided voluntarily to law enforcement or obtained by law enforcement across state lines,” Professor Rebecca Wexler, a  co-faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, told the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and a co-author outline the dearth of even attempted recall of state judges, pointing out that then-Supreme Court Justice Rose Bird, ’65 didn’t face a recall, but was instead not retained by voters in the 1986 general election. “A once-cumbersome and ineffective judicial discipline resulted in a substantial constitutional reform, which produced a far-more-effective discipline system centralized in the Commission on Judicial Performance,” they write. “Although the voters have always had the option since 1911 to recall any bench officer, they have done so only rarely, and never at the appellate level. ” 

On July 12, Professor Khiara M. Bridges testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about the fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. Bridges’ exchanges with several senators, particularly Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, drew extensive media coverage. 

“It’s unclear where the court is going to draw the line,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says of states’ efforts to enact new regulations. “I think there’s a strong argument that all of these are constitutional. There’s also going to be an argument that they are unconstitutional. I think it’s important to adopt the laws and then see where the court is going to draw the line.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky offers his analysis of the just-completed Supreme Court term, including the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. 

Professor John Yoo unpacks the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, as well as other recent Supreme Court rulings. 

“It’s up to states, really, as to how they want to go about making abortion unacceptable,” Professor Khiara M. Bridges says, predicting the argument over whether the federal government can protect access to abortion pills, particularly mifepristone, “a long-term battle.” 

“The argument for settling at something lower is that litigation is expensive,” Professor Adam Badawi says of Musk’s effort to back out of his $44 billion deal to buy the social media network. “And this thing is so messy that it might not be worth it.”

“The working class people have been pushed outside L.A. because the region hasn’t built enough housing for them,” says Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, and author of the book Railtown. He and other critics say that while the region has spent billions on rail, it has shot itself in the foot by not reforming its zoning laws and allowing high-density housing to be built near transit hubs while still requiring new apartment developments to build parking spaces for all residents. 

Adam Sterling, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business, predicts an eventual court settlement that allows both sides to save face. “Twitter has an obligation to fight Musk on this, which they’d need to do because they have a fiduciary duty to do what’s best for shareholders and salvage the deal,” he says. 

Lecturer Shanin Specter, who won many of the pre-pandemic verdicts against Johnson & Johnson, cautions against assuming jurors’ mindsets have shifted. “Our experience was that good cases were bringing good verdicts, and bad cases were bringing bad verdicts,” he says. “I see absolutely no between the juries now or during the pandemic, or before the pandemic.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Daniel Farber discuss the potential impact of the West Virginia v. EPA ruling. The ruling “is very vague about what is a major question or what is sufficient specificity to meet it, the court has opened the door to challenges to countless agency actions,” Chemerinsky says. “I think his fundamental objection is, EPA is leveraging a tiny pedal (of regulatory authority) in the Clean Air Act and using it to take over the world,” Farber says of Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion. “It goes beyond the role that Congress gave them in dealing with emissions from specific sources into trying to change the whole energy system.”

Professor Jonathan Simon says there’s no easy way for Jenkins to make a quick impact on crime, or even to significantly affect the jail population. “I think most of the rapid change is what we’ve already gotten: a big change in tone and lots of reminders of the things her predecessor was alleged to have done wrong,” he says. 

“The conservatives on the court turned their ideological beliefs into constitutional doctrine,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes. “This is not the culmination of conservative judicial activism, this is a court that is just getting started.”

Professor Daniel Farber calls the Supreme Court’s ruling “more than a flesh wound” but not fatal. The majority opinion still allows the EPA other options to regulate coal-fired power plants, he adds. “Some people are portraying it as a huge disaster; I don’t think it’s as bad as that,” he says. “It’s a serious setback, but it’s one that we can move past.”

“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. 

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. 

“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. 

“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.

“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.”

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. 

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. 

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.  

Companies often push or ignore the boundaries about what they can tell staff, since the National Labor Relations Board has no power to punish them, Professor Catherine Fisk says. “They’ll spend a few million dollars litigating it, but that’s less than the millions more they presumably think they’ll have to pay if they were unionized.”

With California already behind on its climate goals, the state’s pending decision on whether to list the iconic western Joshua tree as a threatened species could imperil progress further, by making it impossible to build large-scale solar projects in the state’s vast deserts, writes Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. 

An eight-month investigation by The Associated Press in partnership with the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and its Investigative Reporting Program reveals a shadow industry that’s profiting off the Biden administration’s decision to send more than 25,000 Haitians attempting to immigrate into the U.S. back to Haiti, rather than to the South American countries where many had been living.

Professor Jonathan Simon discusses how to interpret the results alongside the successful recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. “I think the constituency for people who really think that the criminal legal system needs a deep reform may in fact be deeper in the East Bay,” he says. 

Kyra Morris ’23, co-leader of the student-led Gun Violence Prevention Project, or GVPP, lost her brother to gun violence in 2014. She calls Newsom’s program a step in the right direction. “Gun violence is a problem that needs to be addressed with all hands on deck,” she says. “We cannot look away from this issue at the state, local, and national levels.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Dennis Aftergut of Lawyers Defending American Democracy argue the U.S. Supreme Court’s originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment “is robbing us of our safety and our children” as an obstacle to sensible gun control legislation. 

Lecturer Shanin Specter discusses the challenges of recruiting paraprofessionals as firms like his expand their practice areas. “It seems that the number of folks going into that area is decreasing or stagnant and it’s a significant need,” he says.

The work of Ethan Elkind, director of the  climate program and the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, on rail transit is cited in this podcast about where the political left is now and what happens next. 

As demand for battery-powered vehicles increases, “we’re just pretty far behind here,” says Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. “But I think we can get things moving, now that there’s bipartisan support for it.”

In a new decision this week, the U.S. Supreme Court court has made it virtually impossible for those whose rights are violated by federal officials to sue, no matter how egregious the constitutional violation or the injury, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes.

Some of the president’s ideas, such as raising the age to own a gun nationwide, could be problematic, Yoo says, adding gun laws might be better left up to individual states in the wake of several recent mass shootings. 

“My sense is that now, more than ever, our country and our world are going to need lawyers to uphold the rule of law and ensure justice,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, telling this year’s graduates to be inspired, not discouraged, by their experience over the past few years. 

Desirée Nguyen Orth, director of the Consumer Justice Program at East Bay Community Law Center, says the Biden administration’s announcement is a step in the right direction. 

Weighing in along with other legal experts, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says “a program to help homeless trans individuals would be allowed so long as it is a reasonable way to achieve a legitimate government objective.” 

Kristin Theis-Alvarez, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, discusses Berkeley Law’s plan to waive tuition and student service fees for in-state residents who belong to a federally recognized tribe

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky predicts we are on the verge of a dramatic change in so many areas of constitutional law and likens this era to the ideological shift the court underwent in 1937, after then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to “pack” the court with additional justices in response to opinions stifling his agenda

Professor Catherine Fisk discusses the Supreme Court’s efforts to force clerks to hand over their phone records and suggests the clerks respond as a group and decline to act until they consult with counsel

Professor Rebecca Wexler, with U Chicago Law’s Professor Aziz Huq, writes, in an era of medication abortion and remote medicine, states’ ability to clamp down on abortion access turns partly on their ability to identify who is seeking such care. Tech companies can make that harder, or easier.

Lecturer Mallika Kaur interviews Nancy Lemon, Herma Hill Kay Lecturer, about her extensive experience in a practice area most attorneys agree is emotionally draining and personally trying

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, with federal law clerk Andrew Chemerinsky, writes the law is clear: The social media companies cannot be punished for being the sites where racist speech was expressed by a deeply disturbed and violent individual

Professor Frank Partnoy’s 2012 interview with the New York Times exploring the moral responsibility we have to care for future generations, is cited

Matthew Stanford, California Constitution Center Senior Research Fellow, explains why only time will tell if the court is in fact prepared to lift its thumb entirely from the pro-arbitration scale

Professor Adam Badawi says Elon Musk would need to prove the true number of bots and the amount Twitter disclosed in its SEC filings rises to the level of a ‘material adverse effect’ in order for him to renege on his offer

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade could have implications for other reproductive rights such as contraception and IVF

Berkeley Law announces it will cover all tuition for current and future students who are both California residents and members of federally registered tribes

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, with Andrew Chemerinsky, writes it is urgent that the Supreme Court justices block Texas HB 20 from going into effect and declare it unconstitutional

Professor Catherine Fisk, Faculty Director of the Center for Law & Work, addresses employee privacy concerns as a growing number of tech companies extend abortion-related travel benefits

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, says open source information can be invaluable at the preliminary investigation stage, as you’re planning either humanitarian relief or to conduct a legal investigation

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says in its initial filing, the plaintiffs in Dobbs were testing how far the Supreme Court would go to disregard the viability line

Alexa Koenig, executive director of the Human Rights Center, says there’s been a shift in how tech companies are responding to events such as the Buffalo shooting

Professor Peter Menell, with Dennis Aftergut of Lawyers Defending American Democracy, writes Sen. Hawley appears ready not only to undo property and free speech rights, but also to bust a foundation of America’s international trade

Professor Khiara M. Bridges explains the obstacles to mail-ordered abortion medications and says she expects a conflict between a state’s ability to regulate the practice of medicine and the federal government’s ability to regulate the availability of any medication in the US.

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, appears on 60 Minutes to discuss open source investigations and says we are headed into an entirely new era of human rights investigations, and war crimes investigations, more generally

Dave Jones and Ted Lamm from the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment weigh in as investors campaign to require insurance companies to make stronger climate disclosures

Professor Dan Farber says the draft Dobbs opinion appears to go out of its way to decide issues that the justices don’t need to reach in order to resolve the case

Four high-ranking congressional Democrats sent formal requests to the CEOs of YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook’s parent company, Meta, on Thursday, asking them to archive content that could be used as evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine and citing a 2021 report from the Human Rights Center

Professor Orin Kerr explains why he believes there are reasons to think that birth control restrictionists will not succeed as abortion opponents have

Professor Khiara M. Bridges warns, if the Supreme Court is willing to do away with longstanding precedent like Roe, Bridges said, it’s impossible to predict what other rights also could be in question

David A. Carrillo, Executive Director of the California Constitution Center, and senior research fellow Allison G. Macbeth, explain how the reasoning in the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion in ‘Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization’ can also be applied to void other federal liberty protections such as contraception and interracial and same-sex marriage

Joshua Spivak, senior research fellow at the California Constitution Center, discusses the complex issues in play in the Chesa Boudin recall effort 

Lecturer Ann Ravel explains potentially illegal campaign finance issues with Maryland Rep Anthony Brown’s AG campaign

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says the announcement that preference for seating for the D.C. Bar Exam will be given to students from D.C.-area law schools is arbitrary, unfair and likely unconstitutional

Professor Orin Kerr discusses the confidentiality rules for Supreme Court clerks

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, discusses the increase in news using open source investigation techniques

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky suggests Chief Justice John Roberts no longer wields the moderating influence he once had over the court’s more hard-line conservatives

Professor Khiara M. Bridges explores the idea of the federal government leasing out federal lands and allow abortion clinics to operate on them

Dean Erwin Chemerinksy says the fact that a prominent Republican leader like McCarthy even discussed invoking Section 4, a political maneuver that has no historical precedence, was “stunning” in and of itself

Professor Khiara M. Bridges helps unpack the complicated question of what constitutes a burden

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says Justice Alito’s opinion, assuming it becomes the final decision, will put many rights in danger

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky warns that if the Supreme Court overturns the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, the justices would likely begin “unraveling the whole fabric of constitutional protection of privacy”

Professor Khiara M. Bridges, one of the authors of an amicus brief in the Dobbs case, says the burden of restricted abortion access will fall heaviest on Black women and expects, if abortion is criminalized and states begin prosecuting people who terminate pregnancies, poor people of color will be arrested and convicted at higher rates than their white counterparts

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky points out that, from 1960 through 2021, Republicans have held the White House for 32 years and Democrats for 29, almost an even split, but Republicans have appointed 15 justices and Democrats only 9

Professor Dan Farber predicts that the Supreme Court’s dismissive attitude toward precedent in Roe v Wade is another signal of a conservative majority that’s eager to roll up its sleeves and “fix” all the issues in the law that conservatives have complained about for years

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky raises concerns that the investigation into the Supreme Court leak could be damaging to the high court

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explores whether the Supreme Court should be as transparent as counterparts in the other branches of the U.S. government.

Professor Khiara M. Bridges appears on the Majority Report to discuss the bombshell leaked US Supreme Court brief from Justice Alito that would overturn Roe V. Wade

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky appears on The Hill TV to discuss the Supreme Court’s apparent intention to overturn Roe v Wade

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says the anti-abortion movement has organized around Roe v Wade, but very few people have read it

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, discusses the use of satellite imagery to capture war crimes evidence

Professor Orin Kerr says we’ve had Supreme Court leaks before, but this is a whole new order of magnitude of leak

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says even without an explicit constitutional amendment, access to abortion in California would be unlikely to change unless a pre-emptive federal law is passed by Congress

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky examines the potential consequences of the Supreme Court’s apparent intention to overturn Roe v Wade

Oaklandside notes that Professor Khiara M. Bridges sounded the alarm in March over the impending loss of abortion protections, and how they would impact vulnerable people

Professor Orin Kerr’s tweets regarding the legal issues relating to the Supreme Court leak are cited

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky predicts that if Justice Alito’s reasoning from the leaked draft opinion is followed, then there is a large number of constitutional rights that are in jeopardy

Professor Orin Kerr says the leaking of the Supreme Court draft opinion is the most egregious violation of confidentiality for a staff member or employee of the court

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says a decision against abortion rights would come down hardest on people who do not have the ability or means to travel where an abortion would be available and the only source of optimism may be in the likelihood that the Supreme Court’s decision will sort of spur activism

David A. Carrillo, Executive Director of the California Constitution Center, says states like California “can use their constitutions to increase protections for reproductive liberty”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes the draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v Wade is right-wing Republican politics masquerading as law

Lecturer Shanin Specter says leaving the definition of individual rights to each of 50 jurisdictions will create the un-United States and predicts it is likely to get worse from here

Dean Erwin Chermerinsky questions whether the intense secrecy surrounding every aspect of the Supreme Court’s work is a good thing

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and NYU Professor Burt Neuborne write the core principle underlying the First Amendment is that government cannot punish speech because it disagrees with its viewpoint, but that is exactly what Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature have done to the Disney corporation for having dared to oppose legislation limiting discussion of gay issues in Florida’s public schools

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky reflects on the LA riots and the anger that remains today because police excessive force, and racist policing continues

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes federal Judge Mizelle’s misguided mask mandate decision is only the latest example of a bad practice that undermines orderly judicial processes and should be rejected by both sides of the partisan divide

Professor Jonathan Simon says, despite recall efforts, San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin has done the things he said he would do

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, says big corporations are perhaps not the ideal “poster child” for a cap-and-trade revenue recipient, they likely do deliver emission reductions

Professor Dan Farber says the Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling in West Virginia vs. EPA is likely to curtail not just EPA’s ability to combat climate change but the government’s ability to protect the public from other threats, from financial fraud to public health

Professor Andrew Bradt says the results of the federal civil trial against opioid manufacturers underway in San Francisco will have ripple effects far beyond just the city

Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon says the Elon Musk/Twitter deal is a fairly standard merger agreement

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, claims that local agencies tend to poorly plan infrastructure work and don’t have enough capacity to manage megaprojects. They also often use procurement methods that create a management bottleneck.

Mridula Raman, Clinical Supervising Attorney at the Death Penalty Clinic, discusses the All Writs Act and if it can authorize prisoner transport in habeas proceedings

Savala Nolan, Executive Director of the Henderson Center for Social Justice, offers words of advice and wisdom to women of color, and other marginalized people, graduating law school

Professor Seth Davis discusses Oklahoma v McGirt’s relevance for disputes about taxation and civil regulatory authority

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky appears on The Nation’s podcast and argues the Supreme Court has empowered the police and subverted civil rights

Ten percent of the seller’s commission from the auction of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s personal mementos will go to to fellowships offered by the Women of Berkeley Law

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, says he believes mass rail transit will get the bulk of the ridership back to pre-pandemic levels.

A former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court wrote an op-ed urging the reexamination of the case of Toforest Johnson, a prisoner on Alabama’s death row long represented by the Death Penalty Clinic

A op-ed Dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote last summer regarding possible D.C. statehood is cited to answer a Washington Post reader’s question about the constitutionality of it

Professor Chuck Weisselberg explains his fears regarding the Supreme Court signaling it may shield police from civil lawsuits for failing to provide Miranda warnings to suspects, saying police could be given an incentive to pressure people who refuse to talk

Professor Frank Partnoy, with fellow Robert Bishop, filed a comment letter regarding the SEC’s recent proposal to halve the deadline for large investors to disclose their stakes in companies

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, says that the challenge on convicting war crimes through social media images will be on the admissibility, on convincing judges this is something they should be allowing or heavily weighing

HRC’s Berkeley Protocol is being used by Ukrainian groups to determine how best to document and preserve evidence, as well as ethical and legal guidance for gathering eyewitness accounts

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky expresses that creating meaningful checks and balances for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office is long overdue

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, appears on the Lawfare Podcast for an in-depth interview examining the history of using social media for international criminal cases and Berkeley/the HRC’s role in developing the Berkeley Protocol

Professor Robert Merges 2004 paper, A New Dynamism in the Public Domain, is mentioned in an article examining whether corporations are going to use IP law to profit from psychedelics

Professor David Oppenheimer discusses the Tesla racial discrimination case and says the judge wrote a very careful opinion that will make it hard for Tesla to appeal

Professor Catherine Crump, Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, filed suit on behalf of a coalition of immigrant rights groups seeking information from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement about the agency’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, a so- called alternative to detention program that has ballooned during the Biden administration

Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon explains the options the board at Twitter has in reaction to Elon Musk’s takeover offer

Professor Catherine Fisk says more needs to be done to protect gig workers and their families

Lecturer Carla Shapreau, who has been working on the case of a Stradivarius violin stolen under the Nazis, is one of the thirty French and international speakers participating in the colloquium devoted to the spoliation of musical instruments in Europe, between 1933 and 1945

Professor Leti Volpp says clarifies a proposed bill would that would permit non-citizens who are authorized to work in the U.S. to become police officers in California

Professor Catherine Fisk explores the leverage workers and employers have when it comes to a return-to-the-office policy

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says the Supreme Court’s holding in Thompson v. Clark was narrow and the justices only ruled that malicious prosecution claims did not require an affirmative indication of actual innocence

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, explains the benefits and challenges of a large amount of social media evidence

Dean Erwin Chemerinksy say Justice Jackson is not going to change anybody’s mind with regard to the abortion issue or the gun issue, but she’s the first justice in history to have ever been a public defender, she’s the first Black woman to ever serve on the court, and these things could really influence others

Professor Khiara Bridges debunks Facebook posts claiming California lawmakers proposed a bill that would allow mothers to kill their babies up to 7 days after birth

Professor Orin Kerr explores how the reshuffled Supreme Court might rule on surveillance and policing

Professor Catherine Fisk explains the lack of coverage gig workers and their families have when people are killed on the job and the cost-saving measures companies like Uber take to exclude their drivers from workers’ compensation

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, discusses the increase in major warrants of arrest coming forward on the basis open source investigations and social media evidence

The Hollywood Reporter ranks Berkeley Law #4 on their Top Law Schools list, calling out of offerings in law and tech and our strength in intellectual property and privacy

Lecturer Mallika Kaur writes, in order for the VAWA to truly positively affect everyone who has experienced gendered violence, it must openly examine the biases faced by minorities and provide support to grassroots initiatives

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says John Eastman’s actions went beyond that of an attorney

Lecturer David Rosenfeld predicts Amazon will do everything they can to avoid a contract with workers at a Staten Island warehouse who voted to unionize

Professor Khiara M. Bridges explains the personal impact of the implication, when President Biden announced his intention to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court, that there was no one qualified 

Professor Catherine Fisk, Faculty Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Work and the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, compares labor organizers at Amazon’s Staten Island facility to General Motors organizers in 1944

Professor Russell Robinson, Faculty Director, Center on Race, Sexuality & Culture, writes while Will Smith slapping Chris Rock will undoubtedly be the most talked about moment from the 2022 Oscars, there was another momentous occurrence at the awards show that not nearly enough people have recognized

Professor Pamela Samuelson is one of a dozen law professors who filed an amicus brief telling the Federal Circuit that a ‘dangerous’ split ruling from it to seal patent licensing information belonging to the private equity firm that is funding Uniloc’s legal war against Apple has flipped the legal system’s “presumption of access” in intellectual property cases

Professor Orin Kerr says someone can protest government policy by expressing your opinion against it, but that expression doesn’t give you a right to damage someone else’s property

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, makes an appearance in State of the Bay to discuss the California Environmental Quality Act and Governor Newsom’s proposed gas rebate for Californians

HRC’s Lindsay Freeman, one of the authors of the Berkeley Protocol, discusses helping groups in Ukraine standardize their efforts and adapt and apply the protocol in this specific situation

Professor Katerina Linos and Professor Laura Fletcher weigh in on the powers and importance of how the ICC investigates war crimes allegations against Russia

Erwin Chemerinsky writes college campuses — particularly law schools — should be places where all ideas and views can be expressed

LLM student Dmytro Tymoshchenko put his studies on hold due to the pandemic and is now living in Ukraine and volunteering with the civilian defense unit in Boryspil, about 20 miles outside of Kyiv

Professor Amanda Tyler discusses working alongside Ketanji Brown Jackson when they were both clerking at the Supreme Court

Wai Wai Nu, visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center, explains the meaning of the U.S. government defining the crimes perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya people as a genocide.

A report, “Systematic Suppression: Hungary’s Arts & Culture in Crisis,” by the Artistic Freedom Initiative, and created in partnership with Berkeley Law and Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, is highlighted

Professor Eric Stover, Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center, discusses the Berkeley Protocol on Open Source Investigations and why it’s important both for the press and for courts, that information is verified

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, made a guest appearance in Lost LA to discuss the rail lines in Los Angeles

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, with Dennis Aftergut, counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy, suggest the Supreme Court subject itself, for the first time, to a judicial code of conduct

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, discusses the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations and the long collaborative process of formalizing OSINT to be admissible in international courts.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky appears in the Climate One podcast to discuss West Virginia v. EPA case and how that can affect the authority of every federal agency

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses how upcoming hearings on President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee will provide an opportunity to help strengthen public confidence in the Supreme Court

Professor Charles Weisselberg says that senior citizens are “falling through the cracks” since the government agency have been undercounting the number of prisoners under its jurisdiction

Jeremy Fogel, Executive Director of Berkeley Judicial Institute, says Judge Laurence Silberman’s suggestion that student protesters at a Yale event should be identified and potentially disqualified from federal clerkships raises the question of “whether a sitting federal judge should comment on a politically charged situation because of the possible perception of bias”

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, writes that rail is slowly transforming key parts of Los Angeles once again back into a railtown

Lindsay Freeman, Law and Policy Director at the Human Rights Center, says that despite the good intentions of the volunteers helping authenticate images and videos of possible war crimes being committed in Ukraine, some may simply fall too far short of the burden of proof required to prosecute war crimes

Lecturer Shanin Specter is representing one of the families that did not sign on to that stipulation offered by Boeing and says that the families will be closely watching the Forkner trial because “they care deeply for accountability for the various wrongdoers”

Rachel Zuraw, Director of LL.M. Professional Development, explains the value in activities outside the classroom.

Professor Andrea Roth cautions that, if DNA consent forms use overly broad language that says the DNA can be used by law enforcement, some courts may not agree it’s a Fourth Amendment violation to search it for an unrelated investigation

Professor Jennifer M. Urban, Director of Policy Initiatives at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, and chair of the California Privacy Protection Agency’s board, discusses the opportunity the agency has to protect privacy and  understand how that work interacts with all of the innovative technologies

Lecturer Ann Ravel says that Trump seems to have made the decision to run by claiming that he planned to be the 47th President instead of saying ‘if I run’  but is being careful to not officially announce that he is running so he can avoid filing a financial disclosure report

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky speaks on the new requirement that all graduating students must take at least one course on race and the law

Lecturer Shanin Specter explains his theories on how the war in Ukraine can end

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at the Center for Law, Energy and Environment, and Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, discuss how the two nations in the US-China joint declaration have the resources to develop and scale up the technologies to solve the global reliance on fossil fuels

Ken Alex, Director of Project Climate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, shares research being undertaken as well as actions California and subnational governments are taking to drastically reduce short-lived climate pollutants—like methane—from key industry sectors within the next decade

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says the Supreme Court has said in numerous cases that freedom of travel is a fundamental right

Adam Sterling, Executive Director, Berkeley Center for Law and Business, explains why the tech billionaire community is in California 

Professor Jonathan Simon comments on the recent Bay area burglary tourism and says that narratives like that of the South American theft groups are “like catnip” for law enforcement

Victor Peskin, Senior Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center, explores the formidable obstacles that stand in the way of actually holding Russian President Putin and his inner circle to account for crimes perpetrated by Russian forces in Ukraine

Professor Peter Menell discusses Southwestern Law Professor Kevin Greene’s ideas on how to fix the structural racism in America’s copyright system 

Professor Catherine Fisk says she sees esports as currently living through what Major League Baseball experienced 80 years ago with “exploitative contracts”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky testified at a California reparations task force meeting, suggesting providing reparations based on lineage, as opposed to race, would make the effort less likely to be overturned in court

Professor Khiara M. Bridges appears on the Berkeley Voices podcast to discuss the history of reproductive rights in the U.S., what’s at stake when Roe v. Wade is overturned and why we should expand our fight for reproductive justice

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, weighs in on the big role social media platforms have to play as activists, journalists, researchers and volunteers race to dig up damning photos and videos of Russia’s conduct in Ukraine

Professor Roxanna Altholz, co-director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic, discusses the murder of two men and a teen – all from the same town – whose bodies were found in Phoenix. The families believe human traffickers were behind the killings.

Dean Erwin Chemerinksy writes U.S. Supreme Court could make a significant ruling on the EPA’s authority to fight climate change—or not

The California Constitution Center’s Dan Bromberg and Brandon V. Stracener write, if protests like the Canadian truckers’ protests came to California, declaring a Canada-style emergency and exercising similar powers is not an option for Governor Gavin Newsom

Professor Amanda Tyler reflects on her time a a Supreme Court clerk with SCOTUS nominee Judge Katanji Brown Jackson

The Human Rights Center’s Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations, the most comprehensive framework for digital evidence collection and preservation for use in international tribunals, is being used to ensure digital evidence is properly collected and stored

Dean Erwin Chemerinksy says that he believes that the investigation of John Eastman is appropriate and necessary because Eastman was the architect of an attempted coup

Professor Robert Bartlett says that MayStreet’s Analytics Workbench allowed for documentation of the vital importance of odd lot quotes in today’s equity markets, especially for higher-priced stocks

Dean Erwin Chemerinksy says he does not think any attorney should be disciplined for protected free speech, but John Eastman’s actions went far beyond the type of speech that advocates for a position

Lecturer Tess Bridgeman says that by tech companies taking action against Russian disinformation, it will allow more accurate reporting of the invasion to be seen by a wider audience

Professor Amanda Tyler, who was a Supreme Court clerk with Judge Katanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s choice to replace Justice Breyer, says she is meticulous in her approach to the law

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky applauds President Biden’s choice of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court and says, in the world of law, credentials don’t get better than hers

Professor Jonathan Simon says the passage of Stand Your Ground laws were a big cultural shift

Professor Holly Doremus and UC Davis Professor Rick Frank offer recommendations for revising California’s antiquated water laws

Professor Andrea Roth discusses the controversial case involving SFPD use of DNA evidence from a rape kit to link the victim to another crime

Lecturer Shanin Specter filed a lawsuit on behalf of a passenger of Ethiopian Air Flight 302, which crashed in 2019, and wants to add Boeing executives as defendants, saying “none of them has been held accountable”

Professor Jonathan Simon explains the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities that are vulnerable to violence

Rebecca Golbert, Executive Director of the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, writes about her personal grief over the situation in Ukraine

Research and reporting from an innovative collaboration between the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law and the Investigative Reporting Program at Berkeley Journalism resulted in this podcast from Reveal exploring how Texas has gone after Roe v. Wade 

A Sacramento Bee editorial suggesting President Biden select Judge Leondra Kruger for the Supreme Court cites a recent study of her record from the California Constitution Center

Professor Orin Kerr discusses the conundrum for the Supreme Court concerning Justice Thomas’ wife’s political actions and says that, while there are no clear-cut rules outlining when justices need to recuse themselves, there are appearance concerns

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says that “John Eastman’s memo outlined how to accomplish a coup”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky expresses that if the lower court ruling is allowed to stand, judges would be given extensive power to micromanage enrollment at every public school in California

Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute, says that by adding solar panel canopies over some of the utility’s Ceres Main Canal “you’re taking something that’s already been altered by human activity and doubling up on the benefits it provides”

David A. Carrillo, Executive Director of the California Constitution Center, describes Justice Leondra Kruger as a median justice based on the fact she has taken an even distribution of liberal and conservative positions

Professor Ian Haney Lopez appears on the Daily Kos podcast to discuss the Race-Class narrative and says that we need to build cross-racial and cross-class solidarity

Professor Ian Haney Lopez comments on the Race-Class narrative and says that we need to build cross-racial and cross-class solidarity

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky comments on the White House’s new environmental colorblind strategy and says that the Supreme Court is very hostile to any attempt to use race as a basis for giving benefits

Professor Jonathan Simon comments on recent overhaul of the agreement that made the District Attorney’s Office the lead investigator into potential officer brutality and says that he doesn’t see a record of failure or betrayal by the District Attorney’s Office that is extreme enough to justify “tearing up the whole document, rather than asking for specific changes”

Lecturer Mallika Kaur highlights the life of Justice Ajit Singh Bains, one of India’s finest jurists and human rights defenders, who recently passed away

Louise Bedsworth, Director of the Land Use Program at the Center for Law Energy & the Environment and senior advisor to the California China Climate Institute, discusses what steps California has taken to help halt climate change which will make life better for Californians, but also create a model for the rest of the world.

Professor Holly Doremus comments that the current blueprint for updating California’s system of water laws is meant to move the system in the right direction

Lecturer Shanin Specter says that about 100 citizens of the area right around the Braun plant in Allentown have developed cancer

Ken Alex, Director of Project Climate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, said it is encouraging to see two of the world’s largest ports, Los Angeles and Shanghai, work collaboratively to accelerate the transition to zero-emission fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Professor Amanda Tyler says the Supreme Court’s order in an Alabama voting rights case sanctions – at least in the short term during a very important election cycle — what appears to be egregious vote dilution rulings 

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment’s Climate Project, discusses Joe Biden’s  guidelines for how states should spend $5 billion in new infrastructure and says fast charges are key

Professor Frank Zimring says that the number of fatal shootings is unsurprising and that policy enacted now may take years to make a statistically significant difference

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, talks to BBC Radio about open-source investigators’ work to find the truth behind news events

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky suggests that President Biden pick a Supreme Court Justice who might put together coalitions for progressive results

Professor Amanda Tyler appears on MSNBC’s The Last word to examine the qualifications of President Biden’s potential nominees to the Supreme Court

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says the Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday to reinstate a congressional district map drawn by the Alabama Legislature serves as an effort by the conservative justices to help Republicans in the midterms

Professor Emeritus Daniel Rubinfeld predicts the Frontier/Spirit airline merger will go through, despite antitrust concerns

Professor Catherine Fisk discusses a potential racial harassment suit against Tesla

Savala Nolan, Executive Director of the Henderson Center for Social Justice, writes that very often, white people and their efforts disappoint her and says if we want cooperative, connective transformation it’s time to increase the heat

A 2016 report by the East Bay Community Law Center that found Black drivers in San Francisco accounted for “48.7% of arrests for a ‘failure to appear/pay’ traffic court warrant,” despite making up just under 6% of the population at the time

Professor Amanda Tyler discusses the reasons Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would be an excellent Supreme Court Justice

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says California Supreme Court Justice Kruger is brilliant and has impeccable credentials as a potential Supreme Court candidate.

Professor Tejas Narechania explains a new act, passed by the FCC that will require broadband companies  provide easy-to-read information about their services to improve transparency

David A. Carrillo, Executive Director of the California Constitution Center, says the California Supreme Court’s ability to reach consensus is its “superpower”

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and Senior Research Fellow Brandon V. Stracener explore the judicial record of California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger based on an analysis by the California Constitution Center of every opinion and vote by Kruger in her time on California’s high court

Judge Jeremy Fogel, Executive Director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, discusses California Supreme Court Justice Kruger as a potential Supreme Court candidate and says she is an independent thinker 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is one of 16 law professors who have filed amicus briefs supporting dismissal of a controversial bankruptcy case involving thousands of talcum powder lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson and says there are “serious constitutional issues”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains the reasons why Justice Breyer is a model for all who sit on a judicial bench

Lecturer Shanin Specter says he is optimistic that judges are listening to calls for changes to common benefit fees and judicial management will modify by streamlining the MDL process

A recent brief authored by Professor Catherine Fisk and 3L Amy Reavis observes that powerful global corporations like McDonald’s control the prices, quality, hours, and other operations, and the franchisee has no way to increase profits other than cutting labor costs

Judge Jeremy Fogel, Executive Director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, explains the impact Covid-related stress has had on judges

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says Justice Kruger has stellar credentials and would add diversity to the court, not only as a Black woman but as a state supreme court justice and someone from the West Coast

Professor Catherine Crump, Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, notes the ACLU’s decision to use tracking technology was made by the ACLU’s fundraising and advocacy team, not its legal department, which often does not work in tandem

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says recent free speech controversies at law schools reflect the times we are living in

Professor Tejas Narechania joins the Strict Scrutiny podcast for a retrospective on Justice Breyer

Professor Daniel Farber says that the new justice should be able to work with other justices on the court but also have the ability to write strong dissents and appeal to the public sense of what the court has done

Professor Frank Partnoy says synthetic shares can exist because the same shares are often lent out to multiple short sellers at once, creating the impression that there are more shares than there really are

Professor Sonia Katyal, published in June in the Georgetown Law Journal, is cited for explaining that corporate and government actors have pushed to transform the law of trade secrecy into one of the most — if not the most — powerful tools to ensure concealment of information

Lecturer Ann Ravel says former president Trump is already getting close to the blurry line between candidate and non-candidate

Professor Tejas Narechania says Justice Breyer brings a level of sophistication and engagement to the Supreme Court’s intellectual property cases that will be missed

Professor Andrew Bradt says it’s unlikely that a federal rules committee is going to make major changes to common benefit fees in multidistrict litigation

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains the hurdles to getting the ERA ratified as a constitutional amendment 

Professor Daniel Farber comments that Justice Stephen Breyer’s  “contribution has taken the form of low-key concurrences and dissents” in the subject of environmental law

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer

Professor Amanda Tyler discusses speculation that California Supreme Court Associate Justice Leondra Kruger could be the nominee to replace Justice Stephen Breyer.

Professor Claudia Polsky, Director of the Environmental Law Clinic, comments on the clinic’s work to address toxic PFAS chemicals in America’s drinking water, describing them as “equal opportunity poisons.” 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky speaks to Justice Stephen Breyer’s legacy

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says California Supreme Court Associate Justice Leondra Kruger has had a stellar career and would be easily confirmable as a Supreme Court Justice

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky comments that there are times when the stewards of our system, like Justice Breyer, must put the good of an institution they love, and of the country they love, above their own interests 

Professor Kenneth Ayotte is one of a group of bankruptcy law professors weigh in on Johnson & Johnson’s use of the bankruptcy system to settle lawsuits alleging that its talc products cause cancer, calling the strategy a “serious abuse” and accused J&J of attempting to “deprive innocent talc victims of their day in court.

Professor Chris Hoofnagle, Faculty Director at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, discusses that in quantum computing, one of the greatest risks of a short-term failure scenario is whether we are willing to recognize it

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky was named the most influential person in American legal education by National Jurist

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses two cases about affirmative action involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina and says that the removal of the affirmative action program would allow the effects of historic discrimination in admissions

Professor Khiara M. Bridges appears on the GOOP podcast in which she explains that the Supreme Court could potentially overturn Roe v. Wade and what this decision could mean for women’s constitutional rights

Adam Sterling, Executive Director, Berkeley Center for Law and Business, says the “in-house counsel” tag implies “outsider” status

Lecturer Mallika Kaur comments that immigration attorneys continue advocating for traumatized clients while juggling challenges of a system that is often re-traumatizing

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment’s Climate Project, was featured on ABC 10 San Diego discussing CLEE’s rail transit report, Getting Back on Track

Professor Pamela Samuelson, with Harvard’s Rebecca Tushnet, filed an amicus brief in Green et al. v. U.S. DOJ arguing that the provisions “disregard and override traditional mechanisms within the Copyright Act that struck the balance between copyright protection and First Amendment interests

Professor Kenneth Ayotte says the private equity consortium that controlled Warrior Met’s finances had a clear interest in a fast bankruptcy process that would largely benefit their own bottom lines, not the interests of the workers

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, discusses a new CLEE report that found San Diego’s nearly $2.2-billion Blue Line trolley extension cost taxpayers double the national average per mile for light-rail projects

Kristin Theis-Alvarez, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, says that she believes that Latino students find Berkeley Law to be a place that shares their commitment to tackling the complex challenges facing their communities

Professor Laurel Fletcher discusses that oppressive governments are criminalizing human rights activism by adopting cyberlaws that align with European standards which allow them to restrict legitimate online expression

Professor Catherine Fisk discusses how in an effort to support and protect essential workers and small businesses, California has introduced the FAST Recovery Act which ensures shared responsibility between franchisors and franchisees for legal compliance 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes that, despite students becoming more dispirited and losing faith in the Supreme Court, they are reminded that there have been other bleak times in constitutional law, and suggests they direct their focus on other avenues for change

Professor Daniel Farber says that any bold actions like a vaccine-or-test mandate or climate change policies through agencies is going to have tough sledding in the Supreme Court

Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy comments that the California’s Employment Development Department’s clawback program is creating debt for some Californians who cannot prove they are working or seeking work, which can further push Californians into poverty

Senator Manchin’s claims about the filibuster are debunked by a 1997 Stanford Law Review article by Professor Catherine Fisk and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky examining the history of the filibuster 

Professor Katerina Linos appears on the GovExec Daily podcast to discuss how to make customer service more effective in government in a very low-tech way

Professor Jonathan Simon suggests recent highway shootings are likely either road rage assaults or calculated attacks against a motorist who the perpetrator already knew – both of which could be aggravated by the growing number of people who are armed

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky reflects on the last five years, looks ahead to his next term as dean and discusses the future of legal education 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses his theme for his AALS presidency : “How Law Schools Can Make a Difference”

Lecturer Rose Carmen Goldberg explores the alarming decrease in accessibility of hospice care despite the increase in death and awareness of the importance of end-of-life care during the pandemic

Professor Catherine Crump, Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, arguing before the Second Circuit on behalf of the plaintiffs in Knight First Amendment Institute v. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, said that the Trump Administration’s alleged “ideological screening” of immigrants and refugees at the border included questions that were too widely asked and general 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is appointed for another 5 year term

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says Peter Navarro’s assertion that the “Green Bay Sweep” was lawful is nonsense and would have been an unconstitutional, illegal coup

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes the Biden administration’s vaccination mandates are clearly legal, but the politicization of the pandemic and vaccines makes it doubtful whether the Supreme Court will uphold them

Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon, with Berkeley Professor Mark Brilliant, writes there’s a forgotten liberal solution to the school system issues highlighted by the pandemic: vouchers 

Mark Cohen, senior fellow and director of the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, says political inertia and questions over how to better address US tech security and Chinese intellectual property theft are hurdles to fixing or shutting down the China Initiative

Lecturer Shanin Specter secured a big-ticket verdict in 2021 – a $9.7 million for a man who sustained neurological damage from a mistake during brain surgery

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and Senior Research Fellow Stephen M. Duvernay explain that California cities have no power to become breakaway republics, and Oroville’s stunt to become a “constitutional republic city” because of unhappiness with the ongoing state of emergency due to the coronavirus pandemic is not a thing

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at the Center for Law, Energy and Environment, explains the hurdles to building food waste recycling plants, a key part of a law taking effect in January that will require municipalities across the state to collect food waste for its potential use in making renewable natural gas for electricity

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes meaningful police oversight will need to come from the political process, from Congress and from state and local governments, rather than from the Supreme Court

Professor Elisabeth Semel, Director of the Death Penalty Clinic, explains that racial discrimination in jury selection is a nationwide issue and says reforming peremptory strikes is only part of the fight 

Professor Khiara M. Bridges shoots down the right’s attempts to portray abortion as a “career choice” explains what is really at stake for women

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains why he thinks the Supreme Court should be expanded and says while it’s true increasing the size of the court might affect its legitimacy, we’re already there

Lecturer Mallika Kaur writes, after a year of unprecedented protests, farmers and agrarian laborers in India have won an unprecedented victory and are now poised to change the whole game

Professor Khiara M. Bridges appears on the BBC’s Americast podcast to discuss Governor Newsom’s plan to use Texas SB8’s framework for gun control and why she believes it is more than just a PR stunt

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Khiara M. Bridges discuss Texas’ SB8 and Governor Newsom’s plan to use it as a framework to address gun violence 

Professor Catherine Fisk comments on the liability of Uber in the shooting death of a driver in San Francisco under Prop 22, which has been deemed unconstitutional, but remains in effect

Mark Cohen, senior fellow and director of the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, says, in the federal ‘China Initiative’ case of Harvard nanotechnologist Charles Lieber, the government is settling for charges that have little to do with technology

Professor Khiara M. Bridges appears on KQED’s Forum to discuss whether Governor Newsom’s plan to use Texas’ SB8 as a framework to address gun violence is legally viable and politically astute

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Khiara M. Bridges explain the differences between Texas’ SB8 and Governor Newsom’s plan to use it as a framework to address gun violence 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Texas abortion case and Governor Newsom’s announcement of a bill that would allow people to sue the makers and sellers of assault weapons

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Khiara M. Bridges discuss the Supreme Court’s decision on Texas’ abortion law and say it subverts the constitutional guarantee that all citizens have the same rights, no matter where they live 

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says Governor Newsom’s pledge to pass a law restricting assault weapons through private litigation is exactly the kind of legal gambit that constitutional scholars have predicted since the Supreme Court majority declined to block the Texas abortion law

Professor Roxanna Altholz, co-director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic, says the United States’ failure to respond to evidence presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights regarding the 2010 killing of Anastasio Hernández Rojas at the hands of U.S. border agents, goes against the president’s campaign commitment that immigration agents “abide by professional standards and are held accountable for inhumane treatment”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses the Supreme Court’s decision to not block Texas law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy which goes against Roe v Wade

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says the Supreme Court ruling in the Texas abortion case has given Texas a roadmap for blocking lawsuits

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky appears on the National Constitution Center’s podcast We the People to discuss the history of religious schooling and public funding in America under the Constitution, including from the founding onward; what historical precedent means for how to understand and interpret the religious freedom clauses of the First Amendment; and how the Court might rule in the case

Matthew Stanford and Brandon V. Stracener, California Constitution Center Senior Research Fellows, explain why it’s time to abandon monitoring software and the traditional closed-book bar examination model itself 

Lecturer Jim Dempsey joined the Bar Association of San Francisco virtual panel discussing the California Privacy Rights Act

The Berkeley Law Opportunity Scholarship program is highlighted as a resource for first-generation students

Professor Jonathan Simon says that crime concerns in L.A. can slow progressive criminal justice reforms, but it won’t derail the reform movement

Professor Jonathan Simon says that due to businesses trying to maximize profits by reducing the number of people working there, the automated self check-outs enable theft

Professor Catherine Fisk, in light of the recent hacking of Planned Parenthood, inputs that although some women might be worried about their jobs, there are laws that protect employees from retaliation for engaging in lawful off-duty behavior

Professor Orin Kerr appears in The Lawfare Podcast to discuss about the merits of Apple’s lawsuit and its implications for the spyware industry and cybersecurity norms 

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says that critical race theory conflated ideas like diversity, equity and inclusion efforts or teacher training meant to raise awareness of why students might face different circumstances

Professor Roxanna Altholz, co-director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic, says that by the United States not responding by the set deadline in the international human rights case involving the killing of Anastasio Hernández Rojas, it gives authoritarian regimes in the Americas permission to do the same

Professor Frank Zimring says that legally limiting the capacity of a magazine is marching pretty far from the core meaning of individual self-defense

Professor David Oppenheimer, Director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law,  comments on the Activision Blizzard Inc. and Monster Beverage Corp. case and says California courts will likely uphold the gender mandate since these laws have become commonplace in much of the world

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is the most important abortion case to come before the Supreme Court in almost three decades

Judge Jeremy Fogel, Executive Director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, talks about the future of virtual courtrooms and how law schools need to be preparing graduates for this “new normal” of courtroom proceedings

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, explains why U.S. construction projects are harder to get done and says the costs are higher than those in Western Europe and democratic nations in Asia

Professor Jonathan Gould argues the standard case against filibuster reform misses an important asymmetry between the two major political parties

Professor Roxanna Altholz, co-director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic, discusses the landmark ruling against paramilitary violence in Columbia and her years long effort to to have the testimonies of the families of victims included in U.S. criminal proceedings against the Colombian paramilitary leaders

Professor Andrea Roth says genetic genealogy can be an effective tool for the public good, but cautions that most states have no restrictions on its use

The LA Review of Books reviews Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s new book, Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights, and says he does not pull his punches

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse on all counts sends a chilling message about the acceptability of vigilantism

Professor Khiara M. Bridges appears on the Our Body Politic podcast to examine the way politicians use Critical Race Theory to win elections

Judge Jeremy Fogel, Executive Director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, comments on Judge Sarala Vidya Nagala ’08’s confirmation to the federal bench and says she is traditionally credentialed, but brings diverse life experience to the table

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says it’s important to remember that Rittenhouse is ultimately responsible for the deaths of two people

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and Senior Research Fellow Brandon V. Stracener examine the idea of creating a new licensed legal paraprofessional for limited practice and say rushing to implement a paralawyer program without public confidence that adequate oversight is ready could further degrade already-low confidence in legal discipline

Professor Andrew Bradt says that gamesmanship of the court is an inherent feature of our federal judicial system

Former Policy Advocacy Clinic teaching fellow Ahmed Lavalais discusses the clinic’s campaign to eliminate debt imposed on youth and families by the juvenile justice system

Professor Andrea Roth comments that investigators may view the 2002 allegation as supporting evidence for another allegation in regards to the sexual assault accusations against former Windsor Mayor Dominic Foppoli

Professor Orin Kerr says that what should be kept and what should be available is a relatively new question in law when referring to Facebook’s claims of deleting the data relating to the New Mexico militia group’s accounts

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, says that the $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill will create new programs that come with complicated and time-consuming rule-making procedures

Lecturer Shanin Specter wins a huge verdict on behalf of his client, a man who suffered long-term neurological injuries from a medical mistake in brain surgery

Lecturer Rose Carmen Goldberg discusses how one law is responsible for decades of sexual assault in the military going unpunished 

Savala Nolan writes the trope of the “Angry Black Woman” is meant to control and undermine Black women

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, in response to the banning of critical race theory, says that whenever the government regulates speech, it has to be clear about what’s prohibited and what’s allowed

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, says that developed countries are not doing enough to support developing nations in their transition to clean energy or their struggles to adapt to climate change

Professor Ian Haney Lopez says that it is false that racial dog whistles are obvious and only appeal to people who are racist

Professor Holly Doremus says that nature can be allowed to function without human interference within reserves, while humans can be allowed to function without concern for nature outside them

Professor Catherine Fisk says filmmaking was the original gig economy, and reflecting on how the movie business dealt with solving problems of pay and portable benefits provides lessons for today

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at the Center for Law, Energy and Environment, and Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, discuss what California is bringing to the international climate table and potential ideas it might take back from the discussion

Professor Russel Robinson urges Dave Chappelle’s to use his talent to recognize, respect and champion all Black people, including the Black LGBTQ community

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says essentially, abortion restrictions do not have race-neutral effects

Lecturer Mark LeHocky discusses the steps that improve settlement efforts that will save time, resources and relationships.

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and Senior Research Fellow Stephen M. Duvernay examine proposed reforms to the state’s process for recalling statewide officers

Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy explains why the fee to cash checks is too high and argues that consumers should instead pay a much lower, flatter fee

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains why the Supreme Court debate over Texas’s SB8 is about nothing less than whether every state must follow the Constitution — or whether a state can be permitted to make a mockery of it

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says no issues in our society are more controversial or more reflective of our political divide than abortion and guns, as both come before the Supreme Court this week

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses SB8 and the brief he co-authored in support of the DOJ’s position, as the Supreme Court looks at the controversial Texas abortion law

David Carrillo, Executive Director of the California Constitution Center, warns against raising the recall bar too high and says making it even harder to use the recall could take it from a rare bird to an extinct species

Lecturer Susan Mac Cormac Taylor discusses the pro bono project she started with the Berkeley Center for Law and Business to help small businesses shuttered by Covid

Professor Khiara M. Bridges say if we win access for trans people of color who are in rural areas, who are poor — then everyone else wins

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at the Center for Law, Energy and Environment, says the stakes are high as a 23-member official delegation from California led by Governor Gavin Newsom heads to Glasgow for the United Nations climate change conference 

Professor john a. powell, Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute, says while race, as a biological concept, is an illusion, racism is a sociological fact when discussing critical race theory in reference to the film, The Power of an Illusion

Ted Mermin, Executive Director of the Berkeley Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice, says, if you have consumer debt, make sure the statute of limitations hasn’t run before you pay

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky appears on Slate/Dahlia Lithwick’s Amicus podcast to discuss the Supreme Court’s latest rulings on police immunity and his book, Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights

Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy suggests allowing the U.S. Postal Service to offer check-cashing services for a few dollars a check will pay for Congress’s stimulus measure and put $2 billion a year in the pockets of the most financially vulnerable Americans

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, explores strategies for reducing transportation emissions

Professor Tejas Narechania says the FCC’s proposal to crack town on spam texts is a good start, but warns it is a hard issue to address

Mark Cohen, senior fellow and director of the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, discusses the DOJ’s The China Initiative says he is deeply concerned about technology transfer to China, but the FBI is going too far

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, with Laurence H Tribe, Jeffrey Abramson and Dennis Aftergut, explains why SB 8 not only stripped Texan women of their rights under Roe v Wade, but made a mockery of the US constitution and the supremacy of the federal courts

Professor Roxanna Altholz, co-director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic, discusses the long term impact of unsolved homicides on victims’ families

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes the Biden administration is hypocritical in simultaneously imposing a moratorium on the federal death penalty and urging that the Supreme Court reinstate the death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

David Carrillo, Executive Director of the California Constitution Center, with Joshua Spivak, advises voters and elected officials to consider the different options for potential recall reform and take a hard look to make sure they do not make the system worse

A working paper by the International Human Rights Law Clinic synthesizes 40 years of research and public information and finds a San Francisco police department historically mired in deep racism and violence

Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute, says corporate commitments to being water positive “are good and important on paper”, but there’s much more companies can be doing

Professor Elisabeth Semel, Director of the Death Penalty Clinic, says from its inception, in this country, the death penalty and racism were inseparable

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky appears on the ABA Journal’s Modern Law Library podcast to discuss why the Supreme Court did not address police powers during the first century of its existence; why the Warren Court was an aberration when it came to curtailing police powers; and what his experience was like when he investigated the Los Angeles Police Department’s notorious Rampart Division in 2000

Professor Amanda Tyler talks to Law and History Review about her book, Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life’s Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union which she coauthored with the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, discusses the how the challenges experienced by the California high speed rail project could impact other projects nationwide

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, says although the federal government regulates offshore operations, the state can take action onshore to protect human health and wildlife

Professor Jonathan Simon says that we shouldn’t trust the conviction rate too much, highlighting that the conviction rate fails to capture how well the district attorney is protecting justice as a whole in the community

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says TX SB8 was designed to cause chaos, and the plaintiffs are just participating in the chaos

Lecturer Jai R. Massari led regulatory advice for financial services firm Galaxy Digital as it acquired crypto custodian BitGo for $1.2 billion — the crypto sector’s first $1 billion-plus deal — earning her a spot as one of Law360’s 2021 Fintech MVPs.

Amelia Miazad, founding Director and Senior Research Fellow of the Business in Society Institute, discusses the Institute’s new partnership with Paul, Weiss and says it will help share our research with the practitioner community

Amelia Miazad, founding Director and Senior Research Fellow of the Business in Society Institute, says she envisions the Institute’s new partnership with Paul, Weiss bridging the gap between theoretical discussions about ESG and what’s actually happening within companies

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is poised to reshape constitutional rights and protections in ways this nation has not seen in generation

Professor David Oppenheimer, Director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law,  says he believes the decision in Diaz v. Tesla case is the largest verdict in an individual race discrimination in employment case

Professor Sarah Song appears on NPR’s Philosophy Talk podcast to discuss immigration and multiculturalism 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes it’s not a coincidence that so many justices are speaking publicly about the court, its reputation, and its processes

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said colleagues should boycott panels where John Eastman is speaking

Professor Amelia Miazad and Dave Curran, executive director of Paul, Weiss’ new ESG and Law Institute (with which the Business in Society Institute is the inaugural academic partner), write legal teams can’t wait for legal education to catch up – they need to hire people now who have ESG knowledge and skills

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky appears on ABC7’s Facebook live “Getting Answers” to discuss what can be done about disinformation (begins at 13:20)

Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy explains what economists call the “Great Gatsby curve” and offers ways to avoid a dystopian future with wide and permanent economic inequality

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga: the pending Supreme Court case dealing with the use of law enforcement surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the state secrets privilege defense

Professor David Oppenheimer, Director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, explains why racial-discrimination suits like the one Owen Diaz is bringing to trial against Tesla, usually don’t make it to trial

Professor Eric Stover, Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center, discusses his mission to shed light on acts of barbarity—and bringing the perpetrators to justice— in relation to massacres such as the Tulsa and Rwandan tragedies

A white paper written by Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic students Tyler Takemoto and Ari Chivukula says most cities give police broad latitude to use surveillance tech during “exigent circumstances”, creating loopholes in citizen oversight

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, discusses a United States Magistrate judge’s decision ordering Facebook to disclose content in order to assess “responsibility for genocide” against the Rohingya before the International Court of Justice

Professor Orin Kerr says the judge’s opinion in Republic of the Gambia v. Facebook highlights the need for higher courts and Congress to update the 35-year-old Stored Communications Act

Stephanie Campos-Bui, Clinical Supervising Attorney in the Policy Advocacy Clinic, explains why juvenile court fines and fees are bad practice, as PAC and a coalition of prominent youth advocacy groups launch Debt Free Justice, a national campaign to abolish court-imposed fines and fees

Lecturer Rose Carmen Goldberg writes about her experience putting her father to rest.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Burt Neuborne suggest abortion providers call Texas’ bluff and say it’s time for every Texas abortion provider to demand antiabortionists show their cards

Professor Robert Bartlett discusses the SEC’s investigation of Activision Blizzard Inc. and says the agency was targeting the executives to get to the bottom of what Activision Blizzard’s leadership knew internally about allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination

A discussion of debate amongst judges concerning multidistrict litigation – and who gets leadership appointments in them – was a highlight in a webinar hosted by the Civil Justice Research Initiative

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses Laporta v. the City of Chicago – the case before the Supreme Court that could lead to police reform by showing cities that it is in their own financial interest to crack down on problem officers, before those officers act off duty in ways that could cost taxpayers millions

Lecturer Shanin Specter discusses his clients’ case against B. Braun which alleges toxic emissions from a company plant caused neighbors to develop sometimes fatal cancer cases

Louise Bedsworth, Director of the Land Use Program at the Center for Law Energy & the Environment and senior advisor to the California China Climate Institute, explores three important facts about our changing climate this summer of cascading climate disasters has put in stark relief 

Mark Cohen, senior fellow and director of the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, explains why President Biden’s proposal to waive all IP rights related to COVID-19 is “toothless virtue-signaling at best — and dangerous economic capitulation at worst”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky suggests the Supreme Court justices stop acting like “partisan hacks” if they don’t want to be perceived that way

Professor Robert Bartlett discusses ways to push companies to change in accordance with shareholder goals of socially responsible investing

Professor Frank Zimring looks back at the age of Attica and says incarceration is a larger part of American life in 2021 than it was in 1970

Mark Cohen, senior fellow and director of the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, discusses the failure of Trump’s so-called China Initiative

Lecturer Mallika Kaur explores how might managers in the legal profession can redefine their leadership styles to listen and plan for primary and secondary trauma responses—in themselves and others – during an interview with Monika Kalra Varma

Professor Christopher Kutz reviews Hélène Landemore’s new book, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century, and its exploration of representative democracy

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky urges Californians to recognize the need to reform the recall process

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says the Texas abortion law was only successful because it had a receptive audience in the Supreme Court and Fifth Circuit and was designed to evade judicial review

Mark Cohen, senior fellow and director of the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, says President Xi Jinping is in effect “weaponising the judiciary” to defend China’s interests abroad

Professor Orin Kerr discusses a pair of federal lawsuits claiming chalking tires is a violation of drivers’ Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures

Professor Chris Hoofnagle, Faculty Director at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, views the Apple/Epic decision as a major victory for app developers, but is worried that the greater freedom to post in-app links will weaken privacy and security, as Apple has warned

Professor Khiara M. Bridges discusses the new Texas abortion law and says it makes it ill-advised for physicians to counsel their patients about their constitutional rights

David Carrillo, Executive Director of the California Constitution Center, appears on NPR’s A1 to discuss the California recall election

Lecturer Shanin Specter discusses whether liability waivers mean giving up the right to sue even if operators are at fault

Professor Jonathan Glater weighs in the pause in student loans and how it showed us a world without student loan debt

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says the Supreme Court’s refusal to block the Texas abortion law opens the door to insidious copycat laws that could be used to attack other constitutional rights

Professor Khiara M. Bridges dispels the myth is that critical race theory is being taught in K-12 classrooms across the country

Professor Catherine Crump, Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, discusses a lawsuit filed by a member of the city’s privacy advisory commission accusing police of violating multiple city and state laws

Professor Khiara M. Bridges appears on the SF Chronicle’s Fifth & Mission podcast to discuss the new law in Texas that outlaws abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and the impact it will have on California

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says the Texas abortion law bans effectively abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy and cannot be reconciled with Roe

Professor Khiara M. Bridges discusses the landmark decision by the Supreme Court NOT to put the Texas abortion restriction law on hold

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky appears on KFI’s Bill Handel show to discuss the new abortion law in Texas, what it means for women in Texas, and how it  impact rulings like Roe v. Wade

Lecturer Jim Dempsey discusses the Juniper breach and says big lesson from the whole ordeal is that the government cannot control its vulnerabilities

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky warns that if the Texas abortion law is upheld, other states could authorize private lawsuits to undermine any right they opposed

Professor Khiara M. Bridges appears on NPR’s Code Switch podcast to explain what moral panics reveal about the ongoing freakout over critical race theory in schools

Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy explains the costs of an individual’s decision to remain unvaccinated on children, disadvantaged communities, people in poorer countries, vaccinated individuals and funders and patients of the health care system

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains why matter what happens in the recall election on Sept. 14, the recall system prescribed by the California Constitution makes no sense and needs to be fixed

Professor Catherine Fisk discusses a California bill that would give farmworkers more ways to vote in union elections

Dr. Rohini Haar, Human Rights Center Research Fellow, with Nick Robinson, senior legal adviser at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, writes it’s up to California to lead the way in support of a coherent national policy on less lethal weapons — their manufacture, procurement and use — that better protects protesters and the public

David Carrillo, Executive Director of the California Constitution Center, discusses the issues related to the Emergency Services Act, potentially created by Gov. Newsom failing to win the recall election

Lecturer Rick Trachok says due to the omission of the MBE portion of the bar exam, Nevada Bar Study needs participation of current Nevada lawyers to test if the MBE portions predicts lawyering effectiveness 

Zulaikha Aziz, co-director of the Afghanistan Project, says the wealth of skills and expertise that has already fled Afghanistan is staggering

Professor Orin Kerr says police ordinarily need a warrant to enter a home without consent, but there is Supreme Court precedent that holds that officers can also enter a home if they have an “objectively reasonable basis for believing an occupant is seriously injured or imminently threatened with such injury”

Savala Nolan appears on KQED’d Forum to discuss new book, Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body

Professor Daniel Farber says the physical and legal infrastructure of the West is geared toward a certain climate regime and, at great expense and effort, dams, canals, and irrigation systems have been carefully engineered for a climate that no longer exists

Professor Jennifer Chacon appears on the Immigration Nerds podcast to discuss the history of policing immigrants through the CJS and exploring better alternatives to managing migration

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky comments on the lawsuit filed by capitol police officers against former President Trump and members of far-right groups alleging they conspired to use violence on January 6th to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the presidential election

Professor Catherine Crump, Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, discusses the clinic’s work and the beneficial experience of clinic work for students, whether their goals are to work in public interest or the private sector

Professor Pamela Samuelson appears on the Techdirt podcast to discuss the Oracle/Google case and what impact the landmark case has on copyright and interoperability

The New York Times reviews dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s new book, Presumed Guilty

Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy, with Emma Elizabeth Gonzalez, directing attorney at the Public Law Center in Orange County, explains why justice in debt-collection cases is one-sided and says the state should guarantee the right to a lawyer

Professor Catherine Fisk says the fight over Prop 22 isn’t over – after consideration by the state court of appeals, it will eventually be decided by the California Supreme Court

Professor Catherine Fisk says the next fight over Prop 22 will be about whether it will remain in place or if companies’ exemption will be rescinded while the appeal process plays out

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky appears on KQED’S Forum to discuss his new book Presumed Guilty, the judicial doctrines that enable illegal police behavior and how to reform them

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky suggests voters bring a lawsuit, ideally directly in the California Supreme Court, where justices could declare unconstitutional the method of choosing a successor if the governor is recalled

David Carrillo, Executive Director of the California Constitution Center, explains the history of recall elections in California and the Legislature can take steps to pare down the replacement ballot

Lecturer Shanin Specter discusses his firm’s decision to require Covid booster shots and their continuing efforts to lead in terms of vaccination in the workplace

Mark Cohen, senior fellow and director of the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, says he expects more lawmakers to take a tougher line on Chinese tech firms operating in America as Beijing’s crackdown continues

Dave Jones, Director, Climate Risk Initiative at the Center for Law Energy & the Environment, says the insurance industry , on the hook for more claim payouts, should be doing more to prepare for climate-related risk

Lecturer Mallika Kaur interviews Blaine Bookey, whose successful case against the DOJ on behalf of a Salvadoran woman who fled domestic violence and was seeking asylum, has brought some hope to survivors of gender-based violence

A blog post by Professor Jonah Gelbach, which expressed reservations about the methodology used in a study that accused some federal judges of extreme racial and ethnic bias in sentencing, led to the authors withdrawing their conclusions 

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and Senior Research Fellow Brandon V. Stracener examine a number of concerns, for both Democrats and Republicans, related to the California recall election

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains why he believes the California recall election violates the U.S. Constitution

Professor Frank Partnoy discusses Nate Anderson and his upstart firm, Hindenburg Research, and says Anderson “seems fearless, even when going after some of the biggest corporate targets”

Professor Aaron S. Edlin explains why the California recall is unconstitutional and should be challenged in court

Professor Elisabeth Semel, Director of the Death Penalty Clinic, discusses the clinic’s recent report, “Whitewashing the Jury Box”, and the long history of stereotypes, often correlated with race, have been consistently used to justify striking jurors 

Professor Jonathan Simon discusses the case of a Contra Costa County sheriff’s deputy being tried for the death of an unarmed motorist now facing a less serious charge after prosecutors failed to demonstrate that he used a semiautomatic pistol in the 2018 shooting — even though there is no dispute that he did

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Aaron S. Edlin explain why the California recall election violates basic election principles and should be declared unconstitutional

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, appears on KQED’s Forum to discuss President Biden’s executive order that aims to make half of all new vehicles sold electric by 2030 and what impact California’s own policies and growing electric vehicle industry will have on the national plan

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, says the California high speed rail project would be eligible for funding under President Biden’s infrastructure plan, but those funds will take years to translate into tangible improvements

Professor Jonathan Gould, with Harvard Law Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos, explores democracy reforms Congress could pass right now—even with the filibuster still in place

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, says the California “hydrogen highway” started as kind of a bad bet by the state that has now become a “legacy zombie technology”

Professor Claudia Polsky, director of the Environmental Law Clinic, discusses her clients’ successful federal suit to compel the EPA to update an oil spill contingency plan they said was woefully out of date

Lecturer Shanin Specter explains that his firm decided to require vaccinations for all employees because they found it wasn’t practical to prep for trials remotely and mentorship suffered in a remote environment

Professor Sonia Katyal explores why, when it comes to LGBTQ equality, the International Olympic Committee and its American counterpart, the US Olympic Committee, still have amends to make

Lecturer Hon. Elaine Rushing’s arbitration decision finds Tesla liable for harassment because it was perpetrated by an employee’s supervisors

Research and data from the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment was used in a Washington Post analysis of the Biden administration’s efforts to transform the nation’s energy and environmental landscape

Professor Rebecca Goldstein discusses President Biden’s action on policing reform thus far and says it’s a tightrope that even the most skilled politician might not be able to walk

Lecturer Rose Carmen Goldberg discusses the crisis of sexual assault in the military

Lecturer Shanin Specter says we would be farther along in the pandemic if all businesses required their employees to be vaccinated

Professor Robert Bartlett discusses a new study he co-authored, “Consumer-lending discrimination in the FinTech Era,” which found rate disparities in the mortgage market that appeared unrelated to creditworthiness

Professor David Oppenheimer discusses affirmative action and his work on the origins of the diversity justification for it

Lecturer Shanin Specter’s recent essay on the Delta variant was quoted in commentary by Michael Smerconish on CNN

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at the Center for Law, Energy and Environment, discusses carbon-capture technology and says we have to sequester carbon at a high rate

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes policies requiring vaccination against COVID-19 need not include, and should not include, exceptions for those who have religious objections to vaccinations

Brandon V. Stracener, California Constitution Center Senior Research Fellow, debunks misinformation surrounding personal belief exemptions for vaccinations of children

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, says the execution of California’s high speed rail project was done backwards and now we’re seeing the political price of that decision

Amelia Miazad, founding Director and Senior Research Fellow of the Business in Society Institute, says the idea of corporate purpose has been very ambiguous, but tying executives’ incentives to purpose-led goals is an obvious way to signal that companies are taking it seriously

An essay from Savala Nolan’s new book, Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body, about the role racism played in her father’s life and death, is excerpted

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says Texas Senate Bill 8, which prohibits abortion after the detection of a fetal heartbeat, is bigger than abortion – it is a terrifying precedent to set for any person who cares about constitutional rights

Professor Frank Partnoy discovers just how easy it is to buy cryptocurrencies and crypto assets — and just how hard it is to get out

Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute, writes modernizing water rights information is a critical step toward enabling California to manage resources and plan for a drought-ridden future.

The San Francisco Chronicle reviews Savala Nolan’s new book, Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body

Professor Jim Dempsey discusses the lawsuit former President Trump filed against Facebook, Twitter, and Google over their decisions to suspend or ban him from using their platforms

Professor Rebecca Wexler discusses a key problem with using a proprietary algorithm in the criminal legal system

Professor Tejas Narechania says President Biden’s recent executive order concerning technology, competition and consumer choice, includes so many different directives and requests in so many disparate areas is itself a point worth paying attention to. The article also cites and links to Prof. Narechania’s recent paper.

The New York Times reviews Savala Nolan’s book, Don’t Let It Get You Down

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains the significance of the Supreme Court decision protecting the free speech of students

Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute, discusses House Bill 4099, which would allocate $750 million dollars for federal grants to fund recycled water projects, such as turning wastewater into high-quality drinking water

David Carrillo, Executive Director of the California Constitution Center, says a plan under consideration in Richmond that could allow undocumented residents to vote in local elections, citing their lack of a public voice despite the “significant contributions” they make to the community and its economy, would not violate the California Constitution

Professor Claudia Polsky, director of the Environmental Law Clinic, discusses the EPA’s updated monitoring requirements for dispersants used in response to oil spills

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says former president Trump’s new lawsuit against Facebook, Instagram and Google will fail due to basic principles of constitutional law 

Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon says Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley “summer camp” has become the biggest matchmaking service for media companies

Lecturer Shanin Specter explains the statute of repose, which sets a strict time limit on liability after construction

Rachel Johnson-Farias, Executive Director, Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice, discusses the history of the reproductive justice movement and her professional perspective on the violation of reproductive rights that Britney Spears’ has testified to experiencing

Professor Khiara M. Bridges explains the origins and framework of Critical Race Theory and her scholarship concerning it

Professor Andrea Roth discusses Orange County’s “spit and acquit” program, about which she’s researched and written a paper 

Professor Khiara M. Bridges discusses Critical Race Theory and debunks myths and misinformation

Lecturer Mark LeHocky says the most highly functional legal teams are the ones that are the most integrated

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky cautions against evaluating appeals courts by their Supreme Court reversal rates, and said the Ninth Circuit’s rate isn’t particularly notable when taking into account the overall rate

Erik Stallman, associate director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, discusses attempts by police officers to deter activist groups and civilians from sharing recordings of officers and other officials by playing pop music to trigger copyright removal

California Constitution Center Executive Director David Carrillo and Senior Research Fellow Brandon V. Stracener suggest President Biden appointing Justice Kruger, who has executive branch experience and currently sits on a western state high court, would be a victory for diversity on several important fronts

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision reversing Bill Cosby’s conviction reminds us that even those who commit despicable crimes are protected by the Constitution

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says now is the time for Justice Breyer to step down if he wants someone with his values and views to take his place

Professor Dan Farber discusses the unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aiming to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way

Professor Jeffrey Selbin, director of the Policy Advocacy Clinic, says an unanimous Idaho Supreme Court decision on court fees sends a clear message that courts should not be in the business of making money off the poor

Professor David Oppenheimer, director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, says bigotry, unconscious bias and systemic racism have long manifested themselves in the relationships minority farmers have with banks, seed companies and equipment wholesalers

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, explains the hurdles and learning curves cities face when they’re introducing rail projects

Lecturer Shanin Specter discusses his clients’ case against B. Braun which alleges toxic emissions from a company plant caused neighbors to develop sometimes fatal cancer cases

Professor Khiara M. Bridges, faculty director of the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice, discusses the legal implications of Britney Spears’ testimony and how it connects to a larger history of reproductive-rights violations

Professor Catherine Fisk says law has essentially incentivized companies to walk right up to the line of threatening their workforce

Professor Catherine Fisk says the Supreme Court decision limiting the ability of union organizers to enter the private property of growers in order to reach farmworkers in California will set a precedent for more challenges to unions and expand property owners’ rights, no matter the industry

Esq. Apprentice, a nonprofit helping low-income women of color train to become attorneys – which started by Rachel Johnson-Farias, Executive Director, Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice – is highlighted 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes legal arguments against D.C. statehood are really a partisan fight

Professor Chris Hoofnagle, Faculty Director at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, suggests changes the new FTC chair could put in place, including developing a new basic internet privacy rule

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky appears on the Amicus podcast to discuss the sneaky significance of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in the major religious freedom case Fulton v. City of Philadelphia

Professor Claudia Polsky, director of the Environmental Law Clinic, appears in a segment about PACE funding to discuss the ELC report, The Dark Side of the Sun: How PACE Financing Has Under-Delivered Green Benefits and Harmed Low-Income Homeowners 

Professor Jeffrey Selbin, director of the Policy Advocacy Clinic, explains the damage juvenile fines and fees do to families and says families can be responsible for fees from the probation department, the state court system, and even “child support” if their child ends up in the custody of the Oregon Youth Authority

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says the current Supreme Court is a very conservative Court, even if we will only get glimpses of it this year

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes religious beliefs do not provide an exemption from civil rights laws and cannot be used as an excuse for discrimination

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act breaks no new legal ground, but has enormous practical significance in that it means that 21 million people will keep their health insurance coverage

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says critical race theory seeks to make real the promises of the 1964 Civil Rights Act

Professor Khiara M. Bridges says bans on critical race theory in public schools are an “intentional misrepresentation” 

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, says industrialized nations have a moral obligation to help less-developed countries deal with climate change, because these nations have emitted and continue to be the source of the largest share of greenhouse gas pollution

Professor Catherine Fisk says frivolous suits are the price we all pay for having legal rights and a court system to enforce them

Professor Catherine Crump, Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, says facial recognition technology and analytics generally have been revolutionary because they’ve put an end to privacy by obscurity

Professor Peter Menell is one of four well-known copyright scholars who urged members of the influential American Law Institute to reject a proposed restatement of copyright law when the proposal comes up for a scheduled vote this week

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, says nature-based solutions to the warming of the planet, which harness the power of nature to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, hold significant promise but need more research and investment

A Washington Post analysis of Van Buren v United States highlights Professor Orin Kerr’s twitter deep dive into the case

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky calls the federal decision to overturn California’s assault weapons ban “an extreme gun rights reading of the Second Amendment”

Professor William Fernholz discusses the federal appeal court decision in the torture and asylum case of Elmer Rogel Lopez. Two graduating students, Rianna Hidalgo and Kelsey Miller, prepared the briefs and delivered the oral argument in this case

Professor Orin Kerr’s amicus brief is cited in explaining the Supreme Court’s decision in Van Buren v United States

Professor Orin Kerr’s amicus brief in Van Buren v. United States is highlighted in a story about the Supreme Court decision in the case

Professor Elisabeth Semel, Director of the Death Penalty Clinic, discusses Governor Newsom’s written argument – which she co-wrote – calling the death penalty racist and discriminatory against Black and Latino defendants

Ted Mermin, Executive Director of the Berkeley Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice, explains what the preliminary injunction against Bank of America means for victims of fraudulent activities on EDD debit cards

Lecturer Mallika Kaur explores how attorneys remain committed to work that affords few successes and often few forms of traditional validation, with Melissa Barbee, class of 2021, and public interest lawyer Taeva Shefler 

Eric Stover, Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center, is interviewed about the Tulsa Race Massacre and the PBS documentary he co-produced about it, “Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten”

Professor Khiara M. Bridges discusses the history of and misunderstandings around Critical Race Theory

Lecturer Shanin Specter, says his father, the late Senator Arlen Specter, told him former President Donald Trump tried to intervene in the New England Patriots’ infamous 2008 Spygate scandal

Professor Andrea Roth appears on Legal Talk Today to discuss the 6th Amendment and virtual court

Lecturer Shanin Specter explains his firm’s successful vaccination and return-to-work policies

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes the Biden administration is making a serious mistake in placing the self-interest of the Justice Department ahead of the people’s right to know if former Atty. Gen. William Barr acted to cover up Donald Trump’s possible engagement in obstruction of justice

Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, says the long-term success of a high speed rail system in California would hinge on whether cities can usher in dense urban development around transit stations

Professor Khiara M. Bridges separates facts from fiction regarding Critical Race Theory

Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center, appears on PBS NewsHour to discuss Myanmar’s military use of killings to terrorize the country, which was the focus of an open source investigation from the Human Rights Center and the Associated Press

An investigation by the Associated Press and the Human Rights Center finds that Myanmar’s junta is hiding, mutilating and cremating bodies to terrorize its citizens since the military takeover

Professor Orin Kerr explains the law of traffic stops on NPR’s Politics podcast

Savala Nolan, Executive Director of the Henderson Center for Social Justice, reflects on the murder of George Floyd and says it falls to white people to understand what happened that day, and why it happened

The story of Berkeley Law’s forthcoming installation “A Time for Change,” contextualizing the removal of the name Boalt from our buildings, is explored in Law.com’s “Ahead of the Curve” column

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is one of 36 constitutional experts who sent a letter telling congressional leaders they have the authority to make the nation’s capital the 51st state

Lecturer Shanin Specter explains his firm’s successful vaccination and return-to-work policies and advises other firms to follow suit

Professor Catherine Fisk says employment laws were developed with the annual flu in mind, not a global pandemic