Media Highlights

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky previews some of this term’s more high-profile SCOTUS cases on the docket so far.

“Protecting the public—not thrift—is the bar’s primary regulatory purpose, and its focus on cutting corners has arguably diluted the bar exam from the nation’s hardest to something that weakens public protection,” write Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center’s Executive Director David A. Carrillo and Senior Fellow Stephen M. Duvernay.

Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former federal judge and a judicial ethics expert, said expanding the court to 15 justices might improve the administration of the high court and cool the rancorous politics around nominating justices.

Professor Charles Weisselberg weighs in on the push for clemency for people who were convicted of crimes committed before November 1987, when the federal parole system was abolished and replaced with new U.S. sentencing guidelines. 

Rio Scharf, staff attorney for the Criminal Law & Justice Center said the suit currently has two plaintiffs, Vaesau and Colin Scholl. If the suit becomes a class action lawsuit, however, the Criminal Law & Justice Center could represent more than a million individuals who allegedly received only a portion of, or none of, the money they’re entitled to.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses the false and misleading statements made by Donald Trump about abortion during debate with Kamala Harris.

Professor john a. powell speaks with Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson about her memoir, Lovely One. 

Wayne Stacy, executive director of the BCLT discusses Berkeley Law’s NIL practicum. 

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law joins Forum to discuss the impact of big cars.

UC Berkeley Law’s Criminal Law & Justice Center and Edelson PC file lawsuit against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, for alleged unlawful failure to provide some or all of the $200 “gate money” to possibly more than a million people.

Professor Jennifer Urban, co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology discusses how university libraries’ lending programs differ from Internet Archive in that reader privacy is at the forefront.

Senior Director of Admissions Anya Grossman, discusses Berkeley Law’s newly announced launch of an AI-focused master of laws degree.

“Campus officials and faculty must themselves model the discourse we want to teach our students to emulate,” writes Dean Erwin Chermerinsky.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, joins Morning Joe to discuss his new book ‘No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States’.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses his new book No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.

Professor Rebecca Wexler discusses the intersection between reproductive justice and data privacy.

“It may seem strange and frightening to suggest thinking of a new Constitution at a time of great partisan division,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But that existed in 1787; in many of the states, the Constitution was just barely ratified.”

Berkeley Law ranked #1 for Legal Technology.

“I worry that our reverence for the constitution, and the understandable fears of the unknown, cause us to ignore the ways in which our governing document is contributing to the crisis now facing American democracy,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

Professor Catherine Fisk weighs in on Governor Gavin Newsom’s return to the office directive for public employees. 

Colleen Chien, faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology and Adam Sterling, assistant dean of Executive Education discuss Berkeley Law’s new AI focused law degree program.

Professor Chris Hoofnagle discusses all things cybersecurity—its theory, history, and future. 

Ethan Elkind, director of the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at Berkeley Law weighs in on The California Air Resources Board’s decision to drop its plan to regulate the jet fuel used for 220,000 in-state flights per year.

Arneta Rogers, executive director at the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at Berkeley Law School, said Trump paved the way for extreme antiabortion laws that are disproportionately harming people living “on the margins” — including people of color and the young, poor and queer — and should be made to own that legacy, because “the stakes couldn’t be higher.”

UC Berkeley School of Law professor Catherine Fisk said that an employer’s intention when reviewing an employee’s email is key to determining whether a violation has occurred. If an employer reviewed a staffer’s email while they were on vacation to offload work to someone else, Fisk said, that type of search may be justified. But searching an employee’s email simply to surveil them probably would not be, she said.

Professor Daniel Farber comments on the boost in courses focusing on climate change issues at universities.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes about the October 2023 term Supreme Court cases he regards as “sleeper cases” that will have lasting impact.

“No Supreme Court reform that has a chance of being adopted anytime soon is likely to make a difference in the court’s composition,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But the presidential election will, and the focus in the months ahead should be on the enormous difference between who Mr. Trump and Kamala Harris would appoint to the court.”

Professor Dylan C. Penningroth joins hosts Leah Litman, Kate Shaw, and Melissa Murray for a conversation about his book Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights. 

Professor Daniel Farber weighs in on President Biden’s proposed Supreme Court reform.

“I strongly support 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices, but I believe that this would require a constitutional amendment, especially if applied to current justices,” said UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

David A. Carrillo, executive director of Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center weighs in on California’s Prop 22 ruling.

“Although Democratic primary voters and delegates may be wary of those with prosecutorial experience, such experience is likely helpful nationally for distancing Harris (and any former prosecutor she might choose as VP) from left wing criminal justice policy positions that are nationally unpopular,” said Professor Rebecca Goldstein. 

Catherine Crump, director of University of California, Berkeley’s Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic weighs in on the controversy surrounding the Olympics’ AI security.

“I am frequently asked about the most important thing to do in regard to changing the Supreme Court,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “The answer is easy: win presidential elections.”

“This problem is so big that the federal government itself doesn’t even know the scope of the problem,” explained UC Berkeley Law Professor Rose Carmen Goldberg.

Leading constitutional scholar and UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky joins SpeechMatters to share both his insights on this Supreme Court term and his reflections on the tumultuous past year on campus.

“Under the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Place, the government needs ‘reasonable suspicion’ to briefly seize your bag at an airport without a warrant or consent to subject it to a drug-detection dog’s sniff,” said Professor Orin Kerr.

Professor Holly Doremus weighs in on the possible impact the Chevron decision will have on endangered species.

“I think that the wild card is if Elon turns Delaware into some kind of cause célèbre for a large set of retail shareholders, given his platform,” said assistant law professor Andrew Baker. “That could happen and become a reason people choose not to incorporate in Delaware,” he said. “But who knows?”

“The legal issues being raised by Republicans about a possible Harris nomination are just noise to generate confusion,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “They have no legal merit.”

Assistant Professor of Law Emily Rong Zhang weighs in on possible legal challenges to Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race.

“If we really think it’s in our interest as a society to be placing these people in state hospitals, that should be on the general fund, the taxpayers, to do that, not on people who are involuntarily being committed to these facilities,” said Professor Stephanie Campos-Bui.

Catherine Fisk, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said public support for unions is at its highest levels since the 1960s. Coupled with recent actions by the NLRB that boost union organizing, those positive attitudes about unions embolden workers to form them, whether on their own as thousands of Starbucks workers have since 2021 or by teaming up with established unions like Volkswagen employees in Tennessee who recently voted to join the United Auto Workers, she said.

“The language that Trump is using is designed to promote and answer a single question: Who threatens you?” Professor Ian Haney López said.

“The long-settled legal doctrine here depends on constitutional permission for forced labor as punishment for crime,” said David Carrillo, executive director of Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center. “Removing that support raises difficult questions that courts will need to rethink — without an established foundation to build on.”

“The language that Trump is using is designed to promote and answer a single question: Who threatens you?” Professor Ian Haney López said.

“DEI is the latest in a long line of dog whistles,” coded words and phrases with a set political message intended for members of certain group to understand, “meant to trigger resentments rooted in racism and sexism, but presented instead as defenses of high principle,” according to Ian Haney López, a UC Berkeley Law professor of public law and author of “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.”

“Judge Aileen Cannon’s stunning ruling dismissing the federal indictment against Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents is just wrong as a matter of constitutional law, but it can be easily overcome,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

Heat waves are more predictable than other natural disasters, however. That can make the coverage expensive, compared with just setting aside money to pay for the added costs, said Ted Lamm, associate director of the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. 

“Quite frankly, we probably need stricter program rules,” said Tejas Narechania, director of the UC Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and one of the project leads. “A lot of people got internet access, and that’s important. But there were lots and lots of problems that could have been, and still can be, solved through good, rigorous oversight and better program goals. And that’s an opportunity for policymakers.”

Professor Adam Badawi weighs in on Skydance Media’s acquisition of Paramount Global, and discusses what control an acquiring company can exert over the decisions made by the acquired company during the regulatory review process.

“Solving the problem of homelessness is difficult and expensive,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But putting people in jail for sleeping in public does absolutely nothing to solve homelessness or help people in need.”

Much of the Biden administration’s executive order may remain unaffected, said Kenneth Bamberger, a UC Berkeley Law professor who has focused on AI regulatory issues. That’s because most of the order’s actions consist of non-binding efforts, like directing federal agencies to draft reports or establish guidelines that wouldn’t have fallen under Chevron. 

Professor Colleen Chien discusses AI web crawlers on NPR’s All Things Considered.

Professor Elena Chachko weighs in on the Supreme Court’s recent administrative law cases.

Professor Jeffrey Selbin weighs in on the Supreme Court ruling on City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson

According to Supervising Attorney in the Environmental Law Clinic at Berkeley Law Steve Castleman, the 2021 retesting found “significant” amounts of contamination that exceeded the cleanup goal of Strontium-90, a radioactive isotope, which he alleges the Navy has since tried to invalidate. 

At times, some have referred to the Supreme Court as “nine scorpions in a bottle,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. That metaphor seems especially appropriate this year, though I would describe them as “nine angry scorpions in a bottle.”

The notion of America recruiting foreigners into its military under false promises isn’t new, said Rose Carmen Goldberg, Director of the Veterans Law Practicum at UC Berkeley School of Law. “This problem is so big that the federal government itself doesn’t even know the scope of the problem,” she explained.

“It’s a court driven by conservative ideology and politics, not precedent or constitutional doctrine,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the UC Berkeley law school dean.

San Francisco-based Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice and the UC Berkeley Law Clinic filed the lawsuit Friday, calling for, among other demands, 100% of the land to be retested for radioactive contaminants. They claim the Navy was obligated to do so, but never did.

“I didn’t expect such a broad definition of absolute immunity for a president for criminal acts,” said Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the nation’s preeminent constitutional scholars. “While the court leaves many issues unresolved, it is a dramatic and stunning affirmation of broad, absolute immunity for a president.” 

Berkeley Law’s Environmental Law Clinic. representing a local environmental justice group, filed a lawsuit against the EPA and the Navy over the troubled cleanup of radiological and other contamination at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky weighs in on the Supreme Court’s Trump vs. United States decision.

Tweet by Professor Orin Kerr quoted in Vanity Fair: “I don’t know if Trump is going to be reelected in 2024. But I know that, if he is, he’s going to preface every blatantly illegal thing he does by saying, ‘Official act, this is an official act.’”

“One of the many policies in California that would be ripe for a legal challenge, without the Chevron doctrine in play, is the state’s zero-emission vehicle and tailpipe standards,” said Ted Lamm, associate director at UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.

“The Supreme Court just ripped away the biggest incentive that cities had to build more shelters and supportive housing for the homeless,” write Berkeley Law Professor Jeffrey Selbin and Jamie Suki Chang, associate professor of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley. 

“Two Supreme Court rulings on Friday that dramatically change the law are profound reminders that presidential elections matter enormously for all of us,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“My hope is that the Supreme Court won’t overrule Stone v. Graham and that it will instead apply it to declare the Louisiana law unconstitutional,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

Professor Jeffrey Selbin and Laura Riley, director of the Clinical Program at Berkeley Law, comment on the Grants Pass decision.

Steve Castleman, a supervising attorney in the Environmental Law Clinic at UC Berkeley Law, which is representing Greenaction, said the Navy and EPA have a legal responsibility to retest the entire site because they found contamination in three parcels.

“The Supreme Court’s decision will have an immediate and devastating effect on those who would have benefited from the $6 billion fund,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It would have provided compensation to over 100,000 victims of the opioid crisis, and the plan also would have provided significant funding for thousands of state and local governments to prevent and treat opioid addiction.”

“What’s so crazy is when we teach election law, a case like this would never come up because we almost never litigate claims over whether or not to have an election,” said Emily Rong Zhang, an assistant professor at Berkeley Law, explaining election disputes are usually over more specific legal debates.

“In Rahimi, the Supreme Court made the right decision for the wrong reasons,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“So far, the term has been less ideologically defined than the last two,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School. “But I really think it is (this) week’s decisions that will determine how we think of the term.”

Generative AI companies have plausible fair use defenses for using works as training data, said Pamela Samuelson, a digital copyright expert and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. But she said courts might look at music differently than they would other works such as computer code, text or images.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday finally brought common sense to analyzing gun rights under the 2nd Amendment,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It will save lives.”

Joshua Spivak, a senior research fellow at the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law who closely tracks recalls nationwide, comments on the recall of a Southern California school board president.

Professor Colleen Chien talks to NPR about Maryland’s mass marijuana pardons, drawing attention to not just the proclamation, but the implementation of relief.

“There is a very ongoing, current debate raging among the justices about how to interpret the Constitution across a range of cases and whether they need to adopt the same approach in all cases,” said University of California Berkeley law professor Amanda Tyler.

Berkeley Law selected as one of “The 13 Best Law Schools to Jumpstart Your Hollywood Career”

Professor Colleen Chien discusses her recent field study of generative artificial intelligence (AI) for legal aid.

Professor Charles Weisselberg discusses the parole process.

“Whatever you might think of the outcomes of any particular case, the role of the jury in assigning blame or protecting the innocent is fundamental to the American understanding of justice,” write Berkeley Law professor Andrea Roth and Rutgers University professor of law J.D. King.

Dean Chemerinsky comments on SCOTUS case City of Grants Pass v. Johnson.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky provides insight into some of the questions raised following the Trump trial and verdict.

“Donald Trump will decry the verdict as being nothing but a political vendetta,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But nothing he says can erase the fact that a jury heard all the evidence and found him guilty on all counts.”

“Of course, the law of the First Amendment must be the starting point and must be adhered to, for public universities and for private schools that choose to follow it,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But we also must realize that it is often just the starting point and do a better job of thinking through how to apply it and what to do in these enormously difficult circumstances.”

“To limit and undo that damage and restore the rule of law, Republicans may have no choice but to respond in kind.” writes Professor John Yoo.

“AB 886 would create an arbitration process with newsrooms to establish a fee that the companies would pay to carry news articles,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “The experience of other countries shows that this type of legislation works.”

Laura Riley, director of the clinical law program at Berkeley Law discusses the Grants Pass v. Johnson SCOTUS case.

“Displaying those particular flags creates the appearance at least that the justice is signifying agreement with those viewpoints at a time when there are cases before the court where those viewpoints are relevant,” said Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute at the University of California, Berkeley Law School.

“We are talking about incarcerating people and taking away the most fundamental of liberties—one’s freedom, one’s liberty in the truest, purest sense,” said Professor Amanda Tyler. “At its core, habeas reflects the idea … that we want to get it right.”

David A. Carrillo, executive director of UC Berkeley Law School’s California Constitution Center, discusses the challenge to Proposition 22.

“You always want to be proactive about the appearance of impartiality,” Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge and the director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, said in an interview. “The best practice would be to make sure that nothing like that is in front of your house.”

Professor Elisabeth Semel joins host Christopher Wright Durocher to talk about her recently released report, Guess Who’s Coming to Jury Duty? 

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law joins a discussion about the future of Amtrak in California.

Pocket-lint speaks with Tejas N. Narechania, Berkeley Law professor, faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, and former Special Counsel to the FCC to get a refresher on net neutrality, learn what the FCC’s decision means, and what could happen next.

“I believe we’re marching toward an uninsurable future” in many places, said Dave Jones, the former insurance commissioner of California and now director of the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California Berkeley law school.

A published study co-authored by Professor Catherine Albiston on counteracting workplace bias against mothers and caregivers is cited. 

Jeremy Fogel, the executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, said it’s “unfortunate” that Supreme Court ethics have become such a partisan issue, which has prevented the country from having a real discussion about how to handle the behavior of the justices. 

Professor Khiara Bridges’ article Race in the Machine: Racial Disparities in Health and Medical AI is reviewed.

“The legal precedent set by the Weinstein appeal should not have any direct bearing on Donald Trump’s case,” said Chesa Boudin, executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at Berkeley Law.

Dave Jones, director of Berkeley Law’s Climate Risk Initiative talks about possible solutions to California’s insurance problems. 

“The promise of AI is that it can create a level playing field for everybody. But we can already see that, organically, legal aid attorneys aren’t going to necessarily have access to the most cutting-edge technologies,” Professor Colleen Chien told Law360. “There’s a risk that this community in particular will be underserved by AI.”

Professor Amanda Tyler discusses the legacy of Mitsuye Endo and her historic Supreme Court victory.

Professor Elisabeth Semel discusses the implications of Batson v. Kentucky (1986) and California’s capitol punishment system. 

“The issue in Trump v. United States is whether Donald Trump can be prosecuted for his conduct in attempting to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential elections,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinksy. “The case should be easy and decided upon the most basic principle of the rule of law: no one, not even the president, is above the law.”

University of California, Berkeley, law and bioethics professor Osagie Obasogie, who has studied excited delirium and sedation, said officers should be banned from influencing medical care. “We need to be sure that folks are treated in a way that meets their medical needs and not simply given a chemical restraint because it’s convenient for law enforcement.”

“If the Ninth Circuit panel’s ruling in favor of Uber is allowed to stand despite AB 5’s reasonable distinctions, it would open the door to countless challenges to laws regulating the workplace and endanger the ability of legislatures to pass laws protecting workers,” write Christina Chung, executive director of the Center for Law and Work at Berkeley Law and Erwin Chemerinksy, dean of Berkeley Law.

Laura Riley, the director of the Clinical Program at Berkeley Law and author of Homeless Advocacy discusses the City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson case.

“Rather than making a clear choice between the charter or the state rules, the county clerk used both,” write Joshua Spivak and David A. Carrillo of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law.

Ted Lamm, a senior research fellow at Berkeley Law’s Climate, Center for Law, Energy & the Environment discusses San Francisco’s Climate Action Plan.

“The Supreme Court should not further criminalize homelessness,” writes Laura Riley, the director of the clinical program at Berkeley Law, and the author of “Homeless Advocacy.” “But whether it does or not, this case should put governments at all levels on notice that humane policies can help to reduce homelessness. We don’t have to let this crisis continue.”

Chesa Boudin, the founding executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at Berkeley Law School, Brendan Cox , and Miriam Aroni Krinsky write about the Supreme Court case City of Grants Pass v. Johnson.

“The case likely will be important in defining the scope of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

Berkeley Law named one of the top schools for Environmental Law by The National Jurist.

Joshua Spivak, a senior research fellow at the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law, said the vast majority of recall attempts fail to make the ballot. But when they do, the politician is more likely than not to be ousted. Since 2011, some 61% of officials nationwide whose recall made the ballot were voted out, he said.

“I believe that reparations that are race-based are likely to be struck down by the courts because of the Supreme Court’s strong hostility to race-based programs,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky by email. “If reparations are in a race-neutral way, such as descendants of slaves, they are more likely to be upheld,”

“Once billionaires are scared of the power of the NLRB, they bring in the big guns,” said Diana Reddy, a labor law professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

“Generally, the guilty party must pay for past harm and refrain from future harm,” in copyright cases said Colleen Chien, co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at Berkeley Law School, in an email. “In the algorithmic context, we have started to see some creative forms of ‘disgorgement remedies’ including destruction of the model or algorithm, retraining it without the infringing material, or some combination of both,” she said.

A large share of the court’s docket touches on “enormously significant and difficult issues,” Dean Chemerinsky told CNN. “It also is a court that has deep divisions. I assume that all of this leads to delays in releasing decisions.”

“Can the government make it a crime for a person to be homeless?”, writes Dean Chemerinsky. “The answer should be obvious to all, but few believe that is the conclusion the Supreme Court will come to when it decides Grants Pass v. Johnson, which will be argued on April 22.”

“Bitcoin is mature enough at this point that it doesn’t have that kind of centralized managerial efforts of others. That’s what moves it into that commodity space,” said Hermine Wong, a lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Law and former director of policy at Coinbase.

Former federal judge Jeremy Fogel, who now runs the Berkeley Judicial Institute, said the timing of Trump’s statement is as significant as what he said, because it could create the impression that when Cannon rules, she is responding in part to what the former president has said.

“There’s been a conscious effort from the beginning to try to make sure that there aren’t real price shocks. … and to try to soften that blow,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. “You have to go basically as fast as the public can accept it.”

The ruling, which led to Warren McCleskey’s execution in 1991, dealt a severe blow to opponents of the death penalty. But it also added legal support to arguments for prosecutorial discretion — that prosecutors, not judges, are the ones to decide what charges to pursue in court and take to the jury, said Elisabeth Semel, a UC Berkeley law professor and co-director of the school’s Death Penalty Clinic.

New report from Berkeley Law students and Lecturer Rose Carmen Goldberg who overseas the Veterans Practicum, looks at the struggles deported veterans face when trying to access benefits they are entitled to.

According to Rose Carmen Goldberg, lecturer at UC Berkeley School of Law and director of the VLP, the report is a testament to a great irony: Veterans, who served in the U.S. military, can be deported. After being deported, veterans have a more difficult time accessing the health and service benefits they’re entitled to.  

Berkeley Law Professor Colleen Chien discusses how a patent can protect your idea and breaks down everything you need to know before and during your patent application.

Lecturer Joseph Lavitt answers questions about comprehensive and collision insurance.

“Kaur’s case should enrage us all. We are not doing nearly enough to identify and support every high-risk domestic violence survivor and victim facing interlocking vulnerabilities,” writes Mallika Kaur author, lawyer and organizer who focuses on gender and minority issues in the U.S. and South Asia. She teaches at UC Berkeley School of Law, including on domestic violence law. She is the co-founder and executive director of the Sikh Family Center.

“With six justices on the court who both oppose abortion and want to limit the power of federal agencies, it is hard to predict the outcome of the mifepristone case, despite the clarity of the issues,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “If the court overturns the FDA here, it will open the door to challenges against countless other drugs.”

AI can narrow justice gap, but women lawyers slower to adopt it found a Berkeley Law study co-authored by Professor Colleen Chien.

“Simply put, we should want our government officials to be able to speak out against false, harmful or hateful speech,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “The Supreme Court should hold that there is a crucial difference between government officials expressing their opinion and those threatening punishment and engaging in coercion.”

“In my 30 years as a trial judge, I have never seen an order like this,” said Jeremy Fogel, who served on the federal bench in California and now runs the Berkeley Judicial Institute.

Lecturer Henry Hecht discusses his essay written for the forthcoming book Legal Briefs: The Ups and Downs of Life in the Law, in which he recounts his brushes with Nixon.

“You can avoid the necessity of consulting with a physician or getting a physical examination by a healthcare provider, and you can just order it delivered to your home and so that expands access,” said Khiara M. Bridges, a professor of law at UC Berkeley who studies reproductive rights. 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is a guest on the podcast Unreasonable to discuss the various interpretations of the First Amendment’s two religion clauses; freedom of speech in the age of artificial intelligence and political deep-fakes; staying positive and vigilant even as an overreaching Supreme Court undermines the constitution it is sworn to uphold; judicial term limits and expansion of the Court;  and the electoral college.

Deported veterans face significant barriers accessing a variety of veteran-centric services, including health care benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to a study by the University of California-Berkeley School of Law.

A commentary about a criminal-justice conference at the University of California, Berkeley organized by Professor John Yoo and Chesa Boudin. 

“The electorate and the legislature share the state’s lawmaking power, so the electorate’s power to propose and adopt tax laws is at least as broad as the legislature’s,” write David A. Carrillo and Stephen M. Duvernay of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law joins Forum to discuss what California needs to do to meaningfully expand its EV charging infrastructure ahead of its 2035 ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars.

“On February 15, Amazon followed the lead of two other major companies and made a radical argument: The National Labor Relations Board, which has existed for 88 years, is unconstitutional,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “If this argument is ultimately accepted by the Supreme Court, it will make virtually every federal administrative agency unconstitutional.”

Berkeley Law Professor and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General, John Yoo, joins the podcast to discuss how the Court came to this decision, their expected ruling on presidential immunity, and its implications for the 2024 presidential race.

“The city’s inability to provide shelter for the homeless is a failure of San Francisco leaders, not the courts,” writes Chesa Boudin, founding executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at Berkeley Law School. 

Ethan Elkind is Director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment discusses robotaxi expansion.

A new report from Berkeley Law’s Death Penalty Clinic finds that just 19 states collect race and ethnicity information from prospective jurors, meaning that a majority of states cannot ensure that their juries are a “representative cross-section of the community ” as mandated by the Constitution.

“In overruling Roe, these justices said that the issue of abortion should be left to the political process and not the courts,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Hopefully, they will follow this approach and not now be so hypocritical as to impose their views.”

“The best option is to leave content moderation to social media companies and encourage them to do a better job of it,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “This avoids the 1st Amendment problems of government regulation and the nightmare of unregulated social media.”

The U.N. human rights investigation began following the petition by Clean Cape Fear, with help from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. 

“For decades, conservatives have identified themselves as the champions of “law and order,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It is ironic and perplexing that they could embrace a candidate who shows so little regard of the law.”

Professor David Hausman discusses a study he co-authored with Dorothy Kronick titled “The Illusory End of Stop and Frisk in Chicago?.”

Dean Chemerinsky writes about the US Supreme Court case Trump v. Anderson.

“The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

An analysis by University of California-Berkeley Law Professor Colleen Chien found that less than 1% of people eligible under New York’s old sealing law successfully navigated the petition process. The new automated sealing process will help ensure that everyone eligible for record relief will receive it.

Andrea Roth, Berkeley Law professor of criminal justice, thinks the current decision to send prosecutors to Alameda County is likely not due to any shortage of prosecutors. Instead, she sees the action as state-oriented. “An alternative possibility is that state officials are understandably concerned about reported crime rates in Oakland for a variety of reasons and have decided to intervene, but don’t want to be seen as overreaching,” said Roth. 

Arneta Rogers, who previously worked with the ACLU of Northern California, will take the reins of UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center for Reproductive Rights and Justice, or CRRJ, just over a year and a half after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court.

Jeremy Fogel, a retired federal judge who has also worked extensively on the issues of judicial ethics and mental health, said the situation surrounding Newman’s suspension illustrates broader problems with how the federal judiciary deals with aging in its ranks. Fogel said a protocol to assess judges’ cognitive function on a regular basis, implemented by the judiciary in consultation with experts, could reduce the kinds of confrontations that can emerge when a particular judge appears to show signs of decline.

“This case provides the court with an opportunity to show that it follows the law and the facts, not just the political preferences of the justices,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“The court should never fail to enforce the Constitution because of the political preferences of the justices or for the sake of political expediency,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But that is exactly what is likely to happen in Trump v. Anderson.”

Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at Berkeley Law discusses on NPR’s Marketplace how automakers like Ford get “extra credit” for EVs they produce toward their overall fuel economy obligations under federal regulations.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes about some of the most important cases of the Supreme Court term.

“This is an effort by a group of lawyers who are foes of the administrative state and the New Deal-era legislation that created the NLRB and the SEC to essentially end enforcement of those statutes,” says Catherine Fisk, an employment and labor law authority at UC Berkeley law school.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky joins host Scott Shafer to discuss the legal perils Trump is facing.

“I live in frustration. And as you heard, every loss truly traumatizes me in my stomach and in my heart. But I have to get up the next morning and keep on fighting,” Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal member, said at an event at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

“And to be almost 70 years old, this isn’t what I expected,” Sotomayor said Monday during an appearance at the University of California, Berkeley’s law school. “But it is still work that is all consuming and I understand the impact the court has on people and on the country, and sometimes the world. And so it is what keeps me going.”

Professor Jeffrey Selbin writes a commentary piece about the U.S. Supreme Court agreeing to hear a case that determines how and when cities can clear homeless camps.

“To keep Big Tech from becoming an unregulated AI oligopoly, we should turn to the playbook regulators have used to address other industries that offer fundamental services, like electricity, telecommunications and banking services,” write Tejas N. Narechania, professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and Ganesh Sitaraman, professor of law at Vanderbilt University. 

“While the Supreme Court could decide to upend more than half a decade of its own Eighth Amendment jurisprudence in deciding this case, it doesn’t need to touch earlier cases in order to strike down the lower-court holdings at issue here that extend constitutional protections to homeless people on the basis of their status,” Professor Jeffrey Selbin told the Chronicle.

“What I always hear now is how, when students are upset or offended, they phrase it as, ‘I feel unsafe.’ And I think it’s so important that we separate out the campus’ duty,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinksy during a panel on campus free speech. “It’s not our role to make them safe from ideas that they don’t want to be exposed to. But that line, I think, has gotten blurred.”

“In both the Boise and Grants Pass cases, the 9th Circuit found that laws that make it a crime to sleep in public impermissibly punish the status of being homeless,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Criminal law exists to punish people who choose to break the law, not for conduct that is not a choice.”

Professor Jeffrey Selbin said the existing cases neither fully tie cities’ hands, as some politicians say, nor provide a broad right to sleep outside, as some advocates say. He defended the status quo in which cities sometimes must seek guidance from federal judges to know whether their local rules are constitutional under the Boise decision.

“This is on of the many things that’s got caught up in the culture wars,” said Berkeley Law’s Holly Doremus. “The expectation was that it would be ratified because the military was on board…but these concerns about global entities controlling the conduct of the United States got in the way.”

Ethan Elkind, director, the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at UC Berkeley School of Law joins Forum host Mina Kim to discuss the strategies oil and gas companies are using to delay or avoid action on climate change — and how California is responding.

“The court’s decisions … could be decisive for the presidential election in a way that we never have seen before,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of U.C. Berkeley School of Law. “But also they will matter as to how the court is perceived.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School, said the Supreme Court should “take the case and resolve early and for the entire country whether Trump can be on the ballot.” 

“Voter turnout is always a big issue in an election, but the parties and candidates may have limited power in actually driving turnout,” writes Joshua Spivak a senior research fellow at Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center. “The previous few elections may be the best indicator of whether people will show up to the polls in November.”

“I do not recall ever facing a new year with such a sense of trepidation and even fear of what to expect,” writes Dean Chemerinksy. “The presidential election campaign of 2024 promises to be unlike any we have seen in American history, and it seems inevitable that the U.S. Supreme Court will play a large role. And the docket for the current term is filled with major issues about controversial matters, such as abortion, administrative law, gun rights and the First Amendment and social media.”

Professor Khiara Bridges joins hosts Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay to discuss conservative backlash to a San Francisco maternal health program for Black women.

Host Elizabeth Binczik speaks with Professor Catherine Fisk about the combination of labor wins this year and what 2023 could mean for labor moving forward.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky takes a look back at the most significant developments from the Supreme Court in 2023.

Professor Holly Doremus comments on the future of the Endangered Species Act.

“Stalkers always find a way to use location data, making this problem “totally foreseeable,” said Catherine Crump, a Berkeley Law School professor specializing in privacy issues involving technology. “It is disappointing that a company as sophisticated and well-resourced as Tesla doesn’t have better answers to this,” said Crump, who is also a former adviser to the White House Domestic Policy Council.

Discrimination cases are generally difficult to argue in court. “You need a smoking gun,” said Khiara M. Bridges, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former professional dancer. The array of aesthetic judgments involved in dance casting and hiring scenarios can make them especially difficult to parse.

Professor Khiara M. Bridges discusses a legal challenge to Texas abortion bans.

Laura Riley, director of the Clinical Program at UC Berkeley School of Law and the author of “Homless Advocacy,” joins host Krystal Norton to discuss the stigma faced by unhoused people in the United States, the history of homelessness within the country, how being an effective advocate means competently and compassionately working with people experiencing homelessness, and models for homeless advocacy.

“I’m committed to a life of public service,” said Chesa Boudin, executive director of Berkeley Law’s Criminal Law & Justice Center. “It’s not an accident that I am working at a public university, but I have no plans to run for office. I’m laser focused on building and growing our center to make sure that it is successful.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes about the SCOTUS case United States v. Rahimi which involves a federal law that prohibits those under a restraining order in a domestic violence case from having guns.

“We didn’t have these professional police forces at the time the Constitution was written, so we did really rely a lot more on citizens for certain types of law enforcement,” said Professor Andrea Roth.

“That stuff will be there for 100 years — if the Navy does it right,” said Steve Castleman, clinical supervising attorney at the Environmental Law Clinic. “If the Navy does it wrong, it will start spreading.”

“Artificial intelligence is taking the world by storm, and University of California, Berkeley, School of Law is at the forefront, helping to mitigate risks and maximize benefits.”

“We want them to retest a hundred percent of the shipyard,” said Steve Castleman, clinical supervising attorney at the Environmental Law Clinic. 

Professor Colleen Chien noted that women and smaller companies typically have a more difficult time securing patents or getting their name on patents, and AI tools could help “level the playing field and improve patent quality.”

“If they’re going to build housing that’s going to be lived in for 100 years or more, we want to make sure that all of the contamination that they can remove is removed,” said Steve Castleman, an attorney with UC Berkeley’s Environmental Law Clinic. “And that will require the Navy to tighten up their cleanup standards and to retest 100% of the work that Tetra Tech did because they did it fraudulently.”

“The power of police is not just that they have guns and have a high degree of solidarity in their unions,” said UC Berkeley law Professor Catherine Fisk. “The power is the political threat that elected officials feel.”

AI companies should embrace the concept of stakeholder capitalism which says businesses should consider their stakeholder network—not just their shareholders—when making decisions, says Berkeley Law lecturer and alum Jesse Finfrock.

“The great thing about framing this accurately as a violation of human rights,” said Claudia Polsky, director of Berkeley Law’s Environmental Law Clinic, “is that framing is capacious enough to include stories about PFAS health harms, ecological harms, corporate responsibility, about lack of regulatory vigor, about inadequate legal remedies for people who are coming out injured.”

“In the best case, the code of ethics announced on November 13 is the first step toward meaningful reform,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “If not, it’s time for Congress to create an enforcement mechanism.”

“If the Supreme Court doesn’t reverse the 8th Circuit’s decision, it will leave little remedy for violations of one of our most important rights,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes about what he calls the potential “sleeper” of the SCOTUS term—Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy.

“A proposal seeking to change Alameda County’s recall law, linking recall procedure to state law may create rather than solve problems, dilute the local electorate’s direct democracy powers, and cede local control to the state,” write Joshua Spivak and David Carrillo of Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center. 

Claudia Polsky, director of Berkley’s Environmental Law Clinic, said it’s rare for the Human Rights Council to send allegation letters to a transnational corporation, rather than solely to national government. “We hope the UN’s action will induce shareholders to bring DuPont in line with international human rights law.”

Professor Khiara M.Bridges also drew another distinction between the role of race in college admissions and the role of race in health disparities. “If you don’t get into Harvard, there’s always Princeton or Columbia or Cornell,” she said. “Maternal death — the stakes are a little bit higher.”

“The 9th Circuit likely would play a key role in another Trump presidency because it is where officials in deeply Democratic states like California and Washington would go to try to block his policies,” said Chemerinsky, the University of California, Berkeley, law school dean. “But Trump’s appointees to the court could make it less likely to rule against Trump.”

Former U.S. District Judge Jeremey Fogel who is currently executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute discusses ethics at the Supreme Court.

Professor Pamela Samuelson said claims that all gen AI outputs are infringing are not persuasive. The “Big Kahuna,” she said, are the training data copyright claims.

The code’s value “will depend in large part on whether and to what extent individual justices are involved in future ethical controversies,” said former federal judge Jeremy Fogel, director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute at Berkeley Law. “My impression is that the process of getting to this point has made the justices more intentional about public trust and confidence and the impact of ethical issues.” 

Retired U.S. District Judge and Director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute Jeremy Fogel said the careful wording of the ethics code and its introductory statement suggest the justices, led by Roberts, approached it as if they were crafting an opinion.

However it is structured, there must be an enforcement mechanism for the ethical code to have meaning, writes Dean Erwin Chemerinksy. “Trust us” is never an adequate answer, especially when dealing with matters of ethics.

“Judicial elections used to be sleepy affairs, and that’s changed in recent years both in Pennsylvania and across the country,” said lecturer Shanin Specter. “And so the reality is the statewide elections cannot be won without spending a lot of money and putting a lot of human resources into the effort, as well.”

“There’s only so much the administration can do without action from Congress,” said Catherine L. Fisk, professor of labor and employment law at Berkeley Law. “Expanding the liability chain for businesses that have illegal child labor present in their supply chains would be the best way to tackle the crisis.”

While charging infrastructure has expanded, it’s still not exactly reliable in may places, said Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. “I think some of that is a victim of the success we’ve had with EV uptake, and so the chargers are getting more used. And the more they’re used, the more they’re going to break down.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinksy writes about the Supreme Court case United States v. Rahimi, a case about the scope of Second Amendment rights.

Professor Catherine Fisk, a faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Work, talks with Law360 about why she thinks stronger laws are crucial and a moral imperative.

Professor Dylan C. Penningroth speaks with KQED Forum host Alexis Madrigal about his new book, ‘Before the Movement’: The Hidden and Vibrant History of Black Civil Rights.

Opinion by Dean Erwin Chemerinksy: “Nothing has prepared me for the antisemitism I see on college campuses now.”

If the Michigan litigation achieves its goal, Berkeley Law Assistant Professor Emily Rong Zhang said she can envision the strategy — focusing on primary preferences instead of general election party results — being picked up by Republicans who might do better if voters of color are packed into a small number of districts. She said she’s skeptical because the Supreme Court “is working hard to say ‘we’re not going to disentangle race and party, even if they’re super intertwined.”

Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, said having companies report water-related sustainability targets and mapping their use across supply chains is an important step to using it better.

“Successful transit systems all over the world have one thing in common: walkable, dense development all around the stations,” said Ethan Elkind, Director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.

“Where forum shopping leads to forum crowding… that’s bad for the docket, that’s bad for the litigants, that’s bad for the judiciary,” said Berkeley Law professor Tejas Narechania.

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment co-writes an opinion for The Hill on the need to rally the IMF toward bold climate action.

“If companies are going to be risk-averse going forward, then all of the groups that have benefited from DEI programmes are going to be harmed,” warns Khiara M. Bridges, a professor at UC Berkeley law school.

Regulating industrial emissions and equipment—as California has been working to do for decades—certainly provides important benefits to surrounding communities, but “it’s not enough to say, ‘Let’s clean this up,’” says Louise Bedsworth, the executive director at the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment (CLEE) at UC Berkeley School of Law.“We have to think about building wealth and investment in communities—it’s all part of implementing environmental law and policy.”

Dean Chemerinsky writes an opinion piece on why Judge Tanya Chutkan should not put a gag order on Donald Trump ahead of his trial in federal court.

“A president’s most long-lasting legacy is arguably the judges he appoints,” writes Dean Chemerinsky in his opinion piece. “Many will serve for decades after the president leaves office. Republicans have tended to recognize this much more than Democrats. That needs to change, and quickly.”

“Changing the language of a program by itself is not enough to avoid litigation and the design of DEI programs must make clear that there is no racial, gender, religious, or national origin exclusion,” said Professor Catherine Fisk..

“While it may yield some monetary victories, American antitrust law is a very limited tool to restructure the uneven playing field of American business.” writes Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy.

Dan Farber, faculty director of Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment and Evan George, communications director of the UCLA Emmet Institute on Climate Change and the Environment write an opinion piece on the danger Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign poses to climate progress.   

“Overwhelmed by the paintings and awe-stuck by the artist who created them, I fumbled my few seconds with Mr. Botero. My memory is that I offered an anodyne appreciation of his work. If I could speak with him now, here is what I would say:,” writes Professor Laurel E. Fletcher in her opinion piece.

Emily Rong Zang, assistant professor at UC Berkeley Law School, discusses her research on voter turnout in the United States. 

“I assume (Katherine Feinstein) will have to wait; they’ll have to open a probate proceeding and she’ll have to be appointed as the executor,” said Eric Rakowski, a professor at Berkeley Law who teaches estates and trusts. “She can maintain the same causes of action but now in a different role as executor for the estate.” 

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at U.C. Berkeley, told me that A.D.F. “puts freedom to discriminate over freedom from discrimination.” 

“In the last two years, the Supreme Court has dramatically moved constitutional law in a conservative direction,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“The federal government has a limited ability to increase the supply of housing, but it can do one simple thing to help buyers: First-time homebuyers should be eligible for a federally guaranteed, graduated-payment mortgage,” writes Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy.

Michael Kiparsky, founding director of the Wheeler Water Institute at Berkeley Law said the idea behind creating these quasi-governmental districts was sound. They brought together a group of landowners and enabled them to pool resources and build costly water infrastructure. The problem, he said, is that you can “get situations where you literally have one or a small number of very large landowners controlling an entity that is managing a public resource owned by the state of California.”

“This is what the court conservatives have wanted for decades – and it is not disappointing them,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School.

“The laws in Texas and more than a dozen other states which ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors are stunning in their cruelty and are clearly unconstitutional, as infringing on the rights of parents to control the upbringing of their children,” writes Dean Chemerinsky.

Professor John Yoo, testifying in defense of Trump attorney John Eastman, told the California State Bar Court that he doesn’t share his colleague’s belief that Vice President Mike Pence had basis to alter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses the Supreme Court’s October 2023 term.

“The usual inquiry at the beginning of a term is, ‘What are the big cases and how is the court likely to rule on those cases?'” retired federal judge Jeremy Fogel, who heads the Berkeley Judicial Institute at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said in an interview. “But the question about the court’s administration of its own business – I don’t remember ever seeing that at the beginning of a term.”

Professor Dylan Penningroth appears on LAist’s AirTalk to discuss his new book, Before The Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights.

Professor Tejas Narechania comments on the FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon.

The Washington Post reviews Professor Dylan Penningroth’s book, Before The Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights.

The primary argument made in the lawsuit brought by the authors, in turn, centers on the alleged illegal use of copyrighted material for the training of the AI models, Pamela Samuelson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley Law School who specializes in the overlap between technology and copyright, told ABC News.

Alexa Koenig and Andrea Lampos, co-founders of the Investigations Lab at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center discuss their new book Graphic: Trauma and Meaning in Our Online Lives.  

Pamela Samuelson, a UC Berkeley professor and expert in generative AI and copyright law discusses “algorithmic destruction” as it pertains to issues highlighted in lawsuits like those filed against OpenAI and Meta. 

“One of the most important themes of the term will be the Supreme Court having to deal with the internet and social media more than ever before,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law.

Chesa Boudin, founding executive director of Berkeley Law’s Criminal Law & Justice Center discusses his familial experience with incarceration, the backlash he received while in office, building out alternative infrastructures, and rethinking decarceration.

Ethan Elkind,director of the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law discusses how California is addressing pedestrian safety issues.

Dean Erwin Chemerinky discusses DA Thien Ho’s lawsuit against the City of Sacramento for not adequately solving the problem of encampments of unhoused individuals. He writes: “The court can’t build more housing or more shelters or provide more social services. It is impossible to see how Ho’s suit will do anything to help.”

“One of the ironies of the call to a more ‘law and order’ approach is that people often associate it with being more effective at trying to reduce crime,” Jonathan Simon said. “I think we have to live with the fact that the actual effects on crime are going to be marginal.”

Chris Hoofnagle, faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and Professor of Law in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law discusses Berkeley Law’s policy and use of generative AI in the classroom.

Berkeley Law’s Criminal Law and Justice Center, or CLJC, held its inaugural event Tuesday, hosting UC Santa Cruz professor Angela Davis in conversation with Chesa Boudin, the center’s executive director.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses ethics at the Supreme Court.

Professor Khiara M. Bridges discusses the impact Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has had on the Supreme Court.

“Other than the occasional fatal admission, with respect to his criminal cases, there is no public interest in putting this man on television. The lies and distortions are nearly constant. Media who give him a platform are failing the public,” said Herman F. Selvin Professor of Law at UC Berkeley Jonah B. Gelbach.

“Having California participate is a big deal,” said Ken Alex, director, Project Climate at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy, & the Environment. “These are difficult cases. They have five defendants who have endless resources; it’s not simple to prove what they need to prove in terms of misrepresentation.”

To understand slavery in all its cruelty, writes historian and Berkeley Law professor Dylan C. Penningroth, we have to grasp what sounds like an oxymoron: the legal lives of slaves.

“Since 2016, the Investigations Lab we founded at the Human Rights Center, a multidisciplinary research institution on the UC Berkeley campus, has trained hundreds of students how to search social media for information about possible human rights violations,” write Alexa Koenig and AndreaLampros, co-founders of the Investigations Lab at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center. “We founded the Lab to create a pipeline of professionals with the latest research skills, but also to support the work of journalists, human rights researchers, and lawyers who may not have the training or time to find reliable data online to strengthen their investigations.”

“The court opened the door to arguments like Whole Foods’,” said University of California at Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk. “I expect we will see a lot more.”

Funding for hydrogen stations is “largely a waste of money” for an “industry that has not proved itself after well over a decade of subsidy in California,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at UC Berkeley Law.

Lecturer Joseph Levitt discusses use of aerial photography by insurance companies. 

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and a 1st Amendment scholar, said it would be easy to cast the decision as another conservative panel ruling against guns, but the decision really wasn’t about guns, but speech — and the decision was “consistent with Supreme Court decisions with regard to commercial speech.”

“There’s very little attention paid to careers on the plaintiff’s side,” said Kate Walford, PLA co-president and third year law student. “(We) really wanted to provide students with resources about this career path and make it a more obvious career path to students within the school, because that wasn’t something that they were seeing coming from the law school (and) legal community at large.”

“It’s kind of like a zero sum type of game in the sense that the more rights you give to fetuses, the fewer rights you give to the people that actually gestate them,” said Professor Khiara M. Bridges.

The social media claim is “blatantly false,” said Chesa Boudin executive director of the Criminal Law and Justice Center at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

“The challenge is to find ways to combat the spread of false information that can harm public safety without jeopardizing freedom of expression,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “The government identifying false speech and notifying social media companies is a sensible way to address this problem.”

“All of the things that the California insurers are asking for, the Florida insurers are allowed to do and then some,” said Dave Jones, a former California insurance commissioner who now directs the University of California, Berkeley law school’s Climate Risk Initiative. “I do believe we’re steadily marching towards an uninsurable future, not only in California, but throughout the United States.”

The bill doesn’t actually give water regulators new powers, but it adds specificity to what was previously a vague section of the state’s water law, said Nell Green Nylen, a senior research fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Law’s Wheeler Water Institute.

Berkeley Law Professor Diana Reddy discusses what is behind this “hot labor summer” and whether the promising trends are here to stay.

“California’s government became more accessible during the pandemic,” writes Professor Jennifer M. Urban, director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, co-director of Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and chair of the California Privacy Protection Agency’s board. “The state has a chance to maintain and grow accessibility for the public and for those who serve the public on boards, bureaus and commissions – but it requires prompt action.”

Mark Cohen from Berkeley Law offers a US perspective on lesser-known aspects of the challenging relationship that exists between the global powers of China and the United States in a new IAM special report – ‘The World’s Rising Patent Powerhouse: A window into the key drivers and developments shaping the Asia-Pacific IP landscape.’ 

Lecturer and co-director of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law’s trial competition program, Spencer Pahlke and Justin Bernstein write about three lessons from mock trial that can be incorporated into trial work regardless of practice area.

“We have seen climate-related, and certainly fire-related, impacts on jails and prisons across the globe with an increasing level and severity as climate change has picked up pace,” said Chesa Boudin, executive director of Berkeley Law’s Criminal Law & Justice Center.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes about the recent Supreme Court decisions that are leading to a great deal of litigation.

This past July, Berkeley Law Human Rights Center, or HRC, partnered with the International Center for Transitional Justice, or ICTJ, to train Yemeni field monitors and investigators seeking to address human rights violations in Yemen’s civil war.

The quandary of how to balance innovation and risk is discussed on Coffee Break with Irene Liu, a Berkeley Boosts webinar series from Berkeley Law Executive Education.

Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at the UC Berkeley School of Law are leading a project to explore the creation of a Direct Air Capture (DAC) facility that uses cutting-edge technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in California’s Southern San Joaquin Valley.

“No judge will get targeted for issuing too harsh of a sentence, but they will get targeted if they’re perceived as too lenient,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“The law on this is unclear, because it is a new issue,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. “The students being minors does make the legal questions more difficult, but even as minors they have privacy rights.”

Author Tony Platt worked with Berkeley Law professors Nazune Menka and Seth Davis, and students from Menka’s “Decolonizing UC Berkeley” class, and many other on his book “The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy and Miseducation at UC Berkeley.” 

Jonathan Simon, a criminal justice professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, said businesses probably do have relatively accurate estimates of how much their inventory is shrinking due to theft. And that it’s possible retail theft has increased partially because of online resale platforms, which serve as a conduit for organized theft for profit.

Berkeley Law is named one of three law schools that offer a legal education relevant in today’s digital age.

“If designed well, deployment of a DAC hub in this region could provide important economic and environmental benefits to communities that have been affected by the impacts of climate disruption on the agricultural economy, and which are likely to experience negative impacts as a result of the transition from the reliance on fossil fuels,” said Louise Bedsworth, executive director of Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. 

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky comments on Vivek Ramaswamy’s proposal to amend the Constitution to take away rights to vote.

“We feel this is just a really opportune time, especially in Sacramento where we have strong policy frameworks,” Executive Director of CLEE Louise Bedsworth said. “We have a lot of political support for taking action on climate and the environment. This seems like a really good time to be building this out.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky analyzes the Georgia indictments.

“If Trump is convicted in federal or state court of the crimes with which he has been charged, he should be deemed ineligible to run for president,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Even if he is not convicted, there is a compelling case that the Constitution bars him from ever holding office again.”

Civil rights activist and Berkeley Law alum Pauli Murray LL.M. ’45, will be memorialized on a special U.S. quarter starting early next year.

“We felt strongly that her life was as precious to her family as it would have been had she been younger, and that we shouldn’t let the formalistic aspects of wage loss or medical expenses control the resolution,” said lecturer Shanin Specter.

“We think of crime and youth violence and youth crime as a systemic societal issue that’s the responsibility of society to correct,” said Rachel Wallace, interim deputy director at the advocacy clinic. “If we’re not giving youth the opportunities to succeed and they’re turning to cycles of violence or cycles of crime, that’s something that is a societal problem that we should all be investing in.”

Chesa Boudin speaks with In These Times about his new job at Berkeley’s Criminal Law and Justice Center and how he thinks abolitionists can win in San Francisco, California, and the nation.

“I do believe we’re steadily marching towards an uninsurable future, not only in California, but throughout the United States,” said Dave Jones, Director of Berkeley Law’s Climate Risk Initiative.

Mark Cohen, an expert on Chinese IP at Berkeley Law discusses the Agreement of Cooperation on Science and Technology between the United States and China. 

Louise Bedsworth, executive director of the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment discusses the $2,999,999 feasibility study awaiting final approval by the U.S. Department of Energy to be led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment.

“Ten years ago there was a reasonable argument that hydrogen could make up a pretty significant percentage of our zero emission transportation needs,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at UC Berkeley Law. “But at this point battery electric has completely dominated the light duty sector, and is looking to dominate on heavy duty, as well.”

The court is making decisions based on the GOP platform, not the Constitution, says Professor Khiara M. Bridges.

“It’s important for schools to clearly state that the disruption of speakers is not tolerated, and if students do that, they will face academic discipline,” says Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and an ABA Journal contributor.

Negotiating collectively could help boxers reap the benefits that other professional sports players have long enjoyed, said Catherine Fisk, an employment and labor law professor at the University of California Berkeley School of Law

“This isn’t binding precedent, just a ruling by one trial judge in one state,” said Berkeley Law professor Daniel Farber. “But it will certainly encourage other litigation and give other judges a little more comfort about ruling this way.”

Legal expert Daniel Farber, a law professor at UC Berkeley, says, although the charges are in Georgia, they have broad implications nationwide.

Dean Chemerinsky writes about the many legal actions against Trump and explains the potential consequences for each.

Berkeley law Professor Kathryn Abrams discusses efforts by Republicans in Ohio and Missouri to undermine a push by pro-choice advocates for more reproductive rights.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment and Berkeley Law discusses congestion pricing and LA Metro’s study examining which parts of the city could benefit most from adopting the practice, and the environmental and public health benefits it could bring.

Ted Mermin, executive director of the Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice at Berkeley Law writes about the effects of the practice of  ‘poverty tows’ in California cities.

“Today, the CCPA no longer reflects the reality of consumer debt in America, and its approach to wage garnishment is in need of reform,” writes Berkeley Law Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy. 

“What is clear is that cities cannot make it a crime or a public nuisance for people to be homeless when there is not adequate shelter space,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“In my career I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anybody,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge who served for years on the judicial committee that reviews judges’ financial disclosures and executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute.

Berkeley Law’s Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses the Trump indictment.

“Officials targeted with a recall, the most personal of the direct democracy devices, are unsurprisingly unhappy about having to defend against it,” write Joshua Spivak and David Carrillo of Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center. “But voters should not be fooled when their targets complain about risks to democracy.”

Professor Kathryn Abrams writes about the defeat of Ohio’s abortion vote and Republicans implementation of other strategies to oppose pro-abortion citizen initiatives.

“It’s one thing for courts to review individual government actions, but [another] for courts to take on the general operation of the government and say, ‘no you’ve got to change your whole overall policy,’” Daniel Farber, a climate law expert and University of California Berkeley Law School professor, told CNN.

UC Berkeley law professor Orin Kerr explains how Fourth Amendment jurisprudence applies to a digital age.

What’s significant about the Hawaii and Montana cases is how far they’ve gotten, said Dan Farber, a law professor and expert in climate litigation at the University of California at Berkeley. The Hawaii case would be only the second to see a trial. 

Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge who leads the Berkeley Judicial Institute in California, said Cannon made “two fairly significant mistakes” during jury selection in the June trial, but said it’s hard to gauge their consequences because the trial did not move forward.

It’s “nothing short of astounding” how attitudes toward the law have changed, largely because few realized at first how far it would reach, said Holly Doremus, a University of California, Berkeley law professor.

Assistant professor at Berkeley Law Diana Reddy said that allegations that fall outside legally protected categories could undermine Lizzo’s body-positive message and “could certainly encourage a settlement.”

Professor Khiara M. Bridges joins host Jonquilyn Hill to discuss the over-the-counter birth control pill on the podcast The Weeds.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes about what the SCOTUS decision to eliminate affirmative action means for California schools.

Professor Orin Kerr writes about Fourth Amendment limits on the government’s power to order Internet providers to run off copies of people’s online accounts and save them for possible later government access.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes about unanswered questions following the Supreme Court rulings on labor and employment law.

“I applaud what the Department of Education is doing, but I think it’s going to be legally much harder to challenge legacy preferences,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. 

Jonathan Simon, a professor of criminal justice at UC Berkeley’s law school, said incarcerating people over minor property crimes makes little sense. “Jail does real harm and makes it more likely the person will be arrested again,” Simon said.

“Streaming has given the studios one more way to exploit writers—and the writers are pushing back,” writes Catherine L. Fisk, faculty director of Berkeley Law’s Center for Law and Work.

“I think it’s going to lead to a great deal of litigation and will take a lot of time to clarify the standard,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law.

David Nahmias, an attorney with the Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law discusses deceptive techniques businesses use to make it difficult for consumers to cancel subscriptions. 

“As schools strive to have a diverse student body after the court’s decision, much can be learned from the experience of states where affirmative action already had been eliminated,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. 

Angeli Patel, executive director at the Berkeley Center for Law and Business discusses BlackRock’s ESG policies.

“Due to the failure to substantially reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in the U.S. and globally, we are marching steadily to an uninsurable future,” writes Dave Jones, director of the Climate Risk Initiative at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.

Judge Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute discusses ethics at the Supreme Court.

Highly technical benefits like tax credits have always been hard for any administration to tell the public about, according to Holly Doremus, an environmental regulation professor at the University of California Berkeley School of Law. 

The University of California, Berkeley School of Law was the first to adopt a formal policy on the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom, but for now the school has decided not to specifically ban ChatGPT from the application process, said assistant dean of admissions Kristin Theis-Alvarez.

Kristin Theis-Alvarez, the assistant dean of admissions and financial aid at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, estimates that a third of the applicant pool discusses their race or ethnicity in narrative statements. “Almost always this is raised in relation to a broader discussion of points of intersection between their racial and ethnic identity, their lived experience, and their interest in law school or specific career goal,” said Kristin Theis-Alvarez.

“Traditional law enforcement approaches have largely failed to disrupt sideshows and so we are seeing a proliferation of new strategies to respond,” said Chesa Boudin, executive director of Berkeley Law’s Criminal Law & Justice Center. 

“If city council members want to express their views — either in support for striking workers or in opposition — that is their constitutional right and part of the normal political process,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

Professor Pamela Samuelson discusses a study she conducted examining recent lawsuits initiated by artists and writers that highlight the controversial nature of generative AI. 

“More and more, we’re hearing from students wanting to play a positive role in the future wellbeing of our planet, as the impacts of climate change increase all over the world,” says Daniel Farber, Faculty Director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at Berkeley.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law discusses what it would take to make cycling safer in California, and how can we improve the state’s biking infrastructure to encourage more riders?

Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial institute discusses ethics at the Supreme Court with Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus.

Professor Andrea Roth discusses new evidence in the Menendez brothers’ case. “If the trials were held today and included Erik Menendez’s letter to Cano and Rosselló’s allegations against Jose Menendez, the second trial may have played out differently,” said Roth.

“There is a huge difference between the city, as an entity, taking the coercive action of not renewing a contract, and individual city officials expressing their views,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinksy.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses the recent SCOTUS term. 

Lecturer Spencer Pahlke discusses how advocacy skills transfer from law school to law practice to life; the forgotten lessons of mock trial that you should resurrect; and how learning, practicing, and teaching are part of a career-long cycle for the skilled advocate.

“The lawsuits raise some very interesting questions,” said UC Berkeley law school professor Pamela Samuelson. “The courts will take them really seriously, but it’s a little bit early to know how the court’s going to look at it.”

“Organizations that take on the public function of protecting at-risk children must be held publicly accountable when they don’t do their job,” said Shanin Specter with the Law Firm Kline & Specter.

“California Gov. Gavin Newsom made the right choice on Friday, July 7, in announcing that he would not continue to fight for parole for Leslie Van Houten,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Since 2016, parole boards have recommended her release from custody five separate times. Each time, the governor — twice Jerry Brown and three times Newsom — overruled that decision.”

Professor Khiara M. Bridges discusses the U.S. Supreme Court’s latest term and credibility.

“The majority opinion stressed that race can’t be used as a factor in admissions decisions,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said. “I think that that would also lead to the conclusion it can’t be used in financial-aid decisions, either.”

“It’s vitally important to hold responsible the child welfare services agencies, and when they don’t do so, it’s important for there to be accountability through the court system on those failings,” said Shanin Specter with the Law Firm Kline & Specter.

“The Supreme Court should have ruled, like the lower courts, that the state has a compelling interest in stopping discrimination,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

Professor Khiara M. Bridges discusses Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s first term.

“I read the America First message as their trying to pressure law schools to read the decision very broadly and to curtail efforts to pursue diversity in all areas,” said Dean Chemerinsky.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses the recent SCOTUS ruling on the Indian Child Welfare Act. 

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley’s law school and one of the country’s top constitutional scholars, said he thinks a constitutional convention is “very unlikely” but warned that it’s an untested and dangerous plan.

In an interview with Professor Khiara M. Bridges, she says “It really is hard to reconcile these decisions with one another in terms of an overarching theory of law.” 

While the revelation cannot change the decision, “it’s something that should’ve come up in the litigation,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law, “because then what the court should have done is say we have doubts about this, we can’t resolve it, we send it back to the federal district court.”

“There’s a desire in both professions to get at the truth and figure out what the evidence points to and that kind of thing, but I think journalists and judges go about it differently,” said Judge Jeremy Fogel, Executive Director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute.

“In striking down the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program, the Supreme Court ignored one of the most basic principles of law: When the text of a law is clear, it must be followed unless it is unconstitutional,” writes Dean Erwin Chemeninsky.

Professor Daniel Farber writes about what the SCOTUS affirmative action ruling means for California.

Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Sharon Inkelas, a distinguished professor of linguistics, associate vice provost for the faculty and special faculty to the chancellor on campus welfare at UC Berkeley, write about the attack on considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education. 

“It is time for a powerful new approach that creates possibilities for students with perspectives and experiences across race and ethnicity; across socio economic status; across gender; and across rural and city centers alike,” write Berkeley Law Professor John Powell and Yasmin Cader, deputy legal director and the director of The Tone Center for Justice and Equality at the American Civil Liberties Union.   

“The term will be most remembered for the decisions of the last couple of days that moved the law in a dramatically conservative direction,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School, referring to the affirmative action, web designer and student loans rulings.

Professor Khiara M. Bridges discusses the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action in college admissions.

“Public schools in California — and in other states like Washington and Michigan — where affirmative action has been eliminated, must now be leaders and show how to achieve diversity without engaging in affirmative action,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinksy.

Berkeley Law’s Dean Emeritus Christopher Edley, Jr., comments on the affirmative action debate.

“I think that had the cards been dealt some other way, it very well could have come out a different way for me had I gone to Harvard, UNC, or the University of Texas at Austin for law school, because these schools do use race-conscience admissions,” said Traelon Rodgers, a third year law student at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

“Law firms will have to develop some expertise around these new rules, that’s going to take time,” said Adam Badawi, a UC Berkeley Law professor. “If these rules do become final, it will take a year or two for them to start feeling comfortable with them and it’s going to slow the deal process down.”

“Many people active in open source reporting will be playing close attention to whether the BBC succeeds,” said Alexa Koenig, executive director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley’s law school. 

Dean Erwin Chemerinksy discusses how this session’s Supreme Court rulings on voting rights have broken with recent trends.

The Honorable Jeremy Fogel, Executive Director of Berkeley Law’s Berkeley Judicial Institute comments on controversies over perks accepted by Supreme Court justices.

“A state government should not be able to sue the federal government just because it disagrees with a federal policy, writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“Why don’t the Supreme Court justices understand that they would benefit greatly from an ethics code and an independent office to assess their ethical issues?,” writes Dean Chemerinsky.

“I’ve always marveled at the fact that a lot of people think that courts are like ‘Judge Judy,’ or that [they are like] some other show they see on TV,” said Judge Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute. “When I was a young lawyer, they expected you to do what Perry Mason did: produce the guilty person.”

“Most big firms, I think they’d say they’re busier again,” said Adam Sterling, the assistant dean for executive education and revenue generation at Berkeley Law. “But law firms aren’t great about managing their head count on a regular basis. Often, they take action in response to crises. Either there’s too much work and attorneys are complaining about how much they’re billing, or the market is slowing, and some firms are laying off people, so others say we should do it as well.”

“We’re so far removed from anything that’s ever happened,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s just guessing.”

Musk’s takeover sparked a “reprioritization of what Twitter means to the world,” said Alexa Koenig, the co-director of the Berkeley School of Law’s Human Rights Center. “I think right now, any responsibility to respect, protect and remedy human rights violations that the company may be causing or contributing to is very clearly taking a back seat to the financial interests.” 

“Many of us are watching to see how visual and other forms of digital evidence become useful or are challenged, what the judges think,” said Alexa Koenig, a co-director of the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and a leading expert on the use of emerging technologies in human rights practice.

“All of this evidence that we’ve seen is that any harm to the states is so weak, it’s way too hypothetical,” said David Nahmias, a staff attorney at the Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law. “For a party to have standing to sue they need to indicate they’ll be directly injured by a policy and that a court could redress the harm.”  

“Escalations of assaults and shootings can have ripple effects for years,” said UC Berkeley law Professor Jonathan Simon, noting that friends or family members often feel compelled to retaliate. “Disrupting that cycle is complex and challenging. Traditionally, the onus has been on law enforcement to intervene, though in recent years many cities have shifted resources from police to civilian interrupters, whose work is still “an imperfect art form.” 

“Like affordable housing, mobility and transportation are a basic human right,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program for the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at University of California Berkeley law school.

Retired U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel, who presided in the Northern District of California, said judges are “uniquely situated” to educate the public as neutral parties. And they’re encouraged by most codes of conduct to do so, said Fogel, who now serves as executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute.

“The Economic Inclusion Civil Rights Act would be the most important legislative advance for civil rights in over a quarter century,” explains the Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law, Professor Erwin Chemerinsky. “It would restore the law to what it was before unfortunate Supreme Court decisions that very restrictively interpreted landmark civil rights statutes. The new Act would be a vital protection against discrimination and achieving economic justice.” 

“If I’m a lawyer sitting in court, week after week, watching juries come in and I’m not seeing Black people, I’m not seeing Latinx people, and I know what their population is in my county, I know something is wrong,” said Elizabeth Semel, an expert on discriminatory jury practices and co-director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. “But how can I figure it out without the data? I can’t.”

Berkeley Law, which has an acceptance rate of under 13%, collects detailed financial data from accepted students through need-based scholarship applications in order to direct financial aid to them in hopes they will enroll. But bolstering economic diversity does not yield the same level of racial diversity as considering race directly, Chemerinsky said.

Chesa Boudin discusses his new role as the founding director of Berkeley Law’s new Criminal Law & Justice Center.

David Nahmias, a staff attorney with the UC Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice, discusses the parens patriae legal theory. 

By offering this support, Berkeley Law Executive Education hopes not only to “mitigate the disruption caused by job loss, but also to foster a vibrant, interconnected community of lifelong learners, ready to adapt to and shape the future of the legal profession,” said Adam Sterling assistant dean of Berkeley Law’s Executive Education and Revenue Generation, and the executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business at Berkeley Law.

Three Jewish students at Berkeley Law received a standing ovation in a Tel Aviv ballroom while receiving an award for Campus Advocacy from the American Jewish Committee.

“Just as cities don’t wait for rush hour to erect traffic lights, the state shouldn’t wait until widespread water scarcity strikes again to empower the Water Board to respond effectively,” write Nell Green Nylen, senior research fellow at the Wheeler Water Institute in the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at Berkeley Law, Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute and Dave Owen, professor at UC College of the Law San Francisco. 

“Gadfly, provocateur, contrarian,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at UC Berkeley, after being asked to describe the group. “They present themselves as, ‘We’re basically liberals, just ones who arrive at different conclusions.’ ”

“The Biden administration crossed a constitutional Rubicon this week,” write Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo and Washington Fellow of the Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life, Robert Delahunty. “For the first time in our history, federal prosecutors have charged a former president.”

“All other judges in the country — state and federal — are bound by ethical rules,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “It is inexcusable that the most important and powerful judges are not.”

Professor Orin Kerr comments on some the investigative steps taken in search for the Idaho killer.

“The fish don’t care if the lawyers are trying to figure out who’s right or wrong if they’re dead,” said Michael Kiparsky, water program director at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at UC Berkeley School of Law.

Dean Chemerinsky writes about the Supreme Court’s decision on voting rights.

“We’re not advocating a vote for or against any of the educational quality measures, but we are in favor of clear constitutional commands,” write David A. Carrillo and Stephen M. Duvernay of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law.

“I am thrilled to be joining a phenomenal group of scholars and students whose work and ideas inspire me everyday,” Boudin said. “Their creativity, their energy, their vision — I am excited to be part of this team and am excited for all of the work we will do together.”

Professor Adam Badawi comments on the PGA Tour and LIV Golf deal.

Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the UC Berkeley School of Law, said it’s vital that state officials look ahead now to improve how the system functions to respond to the next drought.

Professor Sarah Song’s book “Immigration and Democracy” (Oxford) is discussed in Idrees Kahloon’s piece.

“Descriptively speaking, it’s not a doctrine, because there is no case law behind it,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. “Normatively speaking, I hope it doesn’t become a doctrine, because it’s incredibly frightening.”

“The National Labor Relations Act was intended to provide clarity and solid ground on which employees and employers could resolve their differences,” write Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Catherine Fisk. “With Thursday’s ruling, the justices have done the opposite, and workers will pay the price.”

“It’s going to bring relief to a lot of vulnerable families,” said Devan Shea, who helps run the Berkeley Law clinic that studied Arizona’s juvenile court fees.

“The long-term task and responsibility of those who believe in a more just criminal legal system are to educate the public to see these issues with greater clarity — and to mobilize that public to build institutions and infrastructure capable of supporting a society that is safe and just for all,” writes Chesa Boudin, executive director of Berkeley Law’s Criminal Law and Justice Center. “That work is now more important than ever. I look forward to the challenge of taking it on.”

Boudin, who has largely stayed quiet since the recall, steps into a new role this week, as the founding executive director of the new Criminal Law and Justice Center at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law. 

“Make no mistake, deposits in the United States are insured whether the law says so or not,” writes Professor Krishnamurthy. “It is time to recognize this reality and adopt explicit and progressive insurance for large deposits.”

Professor John Yoo with Robert Delahunty, a Washington fellow of the Claremont Center for the American Way of Life, says ethics war on the Supreme Court is a warning for 2024.

“What makes the Fifth Circuit so stunning is not only that it’s dominated by Republican appointees but how conservative they are,” Dean Chemerinsky said.

Berkeley Law Professor Kristen Holmquist discusses how lawyers and law schools are grappling with cultural competency.

Professor of Law Khiara M. Bridges joins hosts Lori Adelman and Leila Durabi for a conversation about reproductive rights.

“There are still some open questions about the extent to which states can issue rules like this,” said Tejas Narechania, faculty director at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. “I think the decision here maybe points toward the states being able to do more of that. I think that’ll be true in the tech space, in particular.”

Law enforcement prosecutions are inherently difficult, UC Berkeley law Professor Jonathan Simon allowed. State law enables police to use deadly force when they reasonably believe they are threatened; juries bring a set of presumptions into the courtroom and historically they have been swayed by testimony of police officers. Considering all these hurdles, “it’s inevitably rare that officers are charged for using force in the course of their jobs,” Simon said, let alone convicted.

“The decision is not remarkable in that it follows decades of precedent,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “Its significance is that it did not impose significant new restrictions on states’ regulatory power. But given how readily the Roberts court has abandoned precedents and ruled in favor of business and against regulation, it is notable and welcome.”

State law mandates that California switch to clean energy and achieve carbon neutrality by 2045. Offshore wind could play an important role, said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, because the power it generates is somewhat more constant than land-based wind or solar.

“If charges are filed, defense counsel will ask for discovery of all evidence known to the D.A. at the time that she expressed her initial opinion, on the basis that the evidence is reasonably likely to be exculpatory,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge and now executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute at UC Berkeley Law School

“It is the responsibility of those who know her and that she respects to ask her to do a final act of great public service for California and the country: resign,” writes Dean Chemerinsky.

The community action group Clean Cape Fear in North Carolina, US, has joined forces with the University of California Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic to formally request that the United Nations investigate multiple alleged human rights violations related to chemical manufacturer Chemours’ release of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from its Fayetteville plant along the lower Cape Fear river.

The erosion of the court’s public esteem is not due entirely to the tenor of its recent decisions, UC Berkeley law professor Jeremy Fogel, a former federal and California state judge and currently executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, told the committee. Among other important factors, Fogel mentioned “a persistently hyperpartisan political environment … and the pervasiveness of social media as a source of misinformation and disinformation about the law, the judicial process and the judges and justices to whom that process is entrusted.”

“Millions of Americans live one purchase away from emptying their bank account, and they pay a steep price for oversights in account management,” writes Berkeley Law Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy. “Better regulation can stop banks from preying on consumer inattention so that overdrafts and NSF can truly function as a means of emergency credit, at least until better options emerge.”

Former federal judge Jeremy Fogel, now executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute at UC-Berkeley Law School, said in prepared remarks it was “awkward” for him to testify because he admires Roberts and understands the complications of adopting a code of ethics for the justices.

Coverage of the hearing on Supreme Court Ethics in which The Honorable Jeremy Fogel, Berkeley Judicial Institute Executive Director participated.

Joshua Spivak, senior research fellow at Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center discusses third parties.

Jeremy Fogel, a former federal district judge and the executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute at the University of California, Berkeley Law School, said other federal judges on the lower courts would benefit alongside the public from the Supreme Court’s taking a more active stance on ethics.

“Part of this story is about how the system they created was vulnerable and all this information was available to someone else.”said Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in criminal procedure and privacy. 

“There should be no First Amendment right to use speech to cause a reasonable person to fear for their safety,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “Based on oral arguments in the Supreme Court on April 19 in Counterman v. Colorado, however, it appears that the justices are likely to make it much harder to prove that speech is a threat.”

“I think the court is slower this year, but it has been pretty slow in recent years, too,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. “It does mean that there again will be a flurry of blockbuster decisions in June,” he added.

If the UN human rights commission chooses to investigate, a special rapporteur would fact-check the allegations in the communication, then issue “pointed” allegation letters to regulators, Chemours and other culpable parties detailing problems and posing questions, said Claudia Polsky, director of UC Berkley Law Clinic.

“The Special Rapporteur can’t compel any action,” said Claudia Polsky, director of UC Berkeley’s Environmental Law Clinic. “But if he decides to investigate the allegations and recommends the companies or agencies take any of the requested actions, the public attention often spurs alleged offenders to respond publicly.”

“They’re the most aggressive (regulations) of their kind,” said UC Berkeley environmental law Professor Ethan Elkind. “There are previous (federal) regulations on locomotive emissions, but these will be the first to really push for zero-emission locomotives.”

Dean Chemerinsky discusses a few of the United State Supreme Court’s most high profile cases to be decided this year.

“The key is to separate the social insurance from the employer’s control and from employment entirely, because that gives employers that are unwilling to comply with the law a lot of leverage over their employees,” said Catherine Albiston,  professor of law and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The ultimate liberty is the right to be left alone, and Dobbs established a clear mandate for state courts to define that right under their state constitutions,” write David Carrillo and Brandon V. Stracener of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law. “This is an opportunity for states to abandon their flawed lockstep doctrines, reassert themselves as the primary guarantors of individual liberty, and restore the state–federal balance of power in this area of the law.”

In a piece by Edward Wasserman, professor and former dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, Dean Chemerinsky said “The law is clear that retaliation against a person—that includes a corporation—for its speech violates the First Amendment. Gov. DeSantis and the Florida legislature have done exactly that, and said that is what they were doing, in its reprisal against Disney.”

Stephanie Campos-Bui, an assistant clinical professor of law at Berkeley Law and Policy Advocacy Clinic, said California law previously authorized the criminal legal system to charge people with over 90 different fees.

“Litigants should not be able to handpick a judge who then can issue a nationwide injunction throwing the entire country into chaos,” writes Dean Chemerinsky.

The court’s decision “is not obviously wrong,” said Dan Farber, an environmental law professor at UC Berkeley, who disagreed with the decision. “But I don’t think it’s crystal clear.”

“Many students come to Berkeley Law with the clear intention of positively impacting communities — whether it be here in the East Bay or globally,” said Laura Riley, director of Berkeley Law’s Clinical Program. “Clinics provide an opportunity to do that while growing advocacy skills that students take with them as they become attorneys.” 

“The approach of finals made us realize that we had to say something,” said professor Chris Hoofnagle. “We want to make sure we have clear guidelines so that students don’t inadvertently attract an honor code violation.”

David Nahmias, staff attorney with UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice discusses student debt forgiveness.

Mark Cohen, the Asia IP Project Director at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, told the Subcommittee that “China’s rise did not occur overnight. Rather, we have made profound mistakes in not identifying China’s increasing innovative capacity and we need to proceed now without the bureaucratic myopia, antique organizational structures and indifference to data that have haunted prior administrations.”

“Ideally, the court, on its own, would adopt an ethics code for its members, writes Dean Chemerinsky and Dennis Aftergut. “The absence of ethical rules is an unnecessary self-inflicted wound. Absent the court reforming itself, Congress must act and impose one on the justices. One would hope that the court would not be so foolish as to declare unconstitutional a law that is meant to regulate it.”

Prasad Krishnamurthy, a professor at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, favors raising the $250,000 cap to an unspecified amount. Recent decisions by regulators to cushion uninsured depositors from losses effectively render the $250,000 limit moot anyway, he argued.

Host Brittany Luse is joined by UC Berkeley Law professor Khiara M. Bridges to connect the dots between the recent legal battles over the abortion pill mifepristone and our constitutional right to privacy.

“This is an issue for the FDA – not the courts – to decide,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “One would hope that even the conservative Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade would recognize this and want to keep the federal judiciary out of the abortion issue. But given the anti-abortion views of a majority of justices, there is every reason to be very worried.”

“We had accepted that federal law would preempt state law, that it would be preposterous that one federal judge in one district in Texas—or in any other state—would be able to affect the availability of a drug that had had FDA approval for 20 years,” says Khiara M. Bridges, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now the things that we thought we knew about the relationship between federal law and state law, and the FDA’s ability to regulate, have been called into question.”

The Daily Californian sat down with Chemerinsky for a conversation about his career as a scholar and advocate, as well as why free speech — specifically on college campuses — matters.

“It sort of puts the fire under all courts in the country to resolve the conflict as soon as possible,” said Professor Khiara M. Bridges.

“The Supreme Court has its lowest approval ratings in history,” writes Dean Chemerinksy and Dennis Aftergut. “Now, as much as ever, it is crucial that the justices make clear that they are not partisan hacks who just follow the Republican platform, but instead are committed jurists who follow the law. The recent decisions concerning mifepristone will give them just that opportunity.”

“The internet and social media provide instantaneous access to infinite information,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “My hope is that the Supreme Court will not step in to this enormously complicated landscape.”

“Judges like to exercise control and Merchan is undoubtedly upset at Trump blatantly disobeying him,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But the better course in this situation is to do nothing and let Trump speak.”

“I am thrilled at the gift from Tom Clark to create a chair in constitutional law,” Dean Chemerinsky said in a statement. “This is obviously such a core area of our curriculum and scholarship; it is law that affects everyone in the most important and intimate aspects of our lives.”

Dean Chemerinsky said the law “is clearly established that when the press lawfully obtains something, they’re allowed to truthfully report it,” and Camacho obviously obtained the images lawfully here.

“Auto companies don’t want EV batteries associated with more destruction than they already have been,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. “There has already been a lot of negative publicity around the mining for these metals: human rights abuses, child labor, deaths from mines collapsing. You can imagine the risk with the deep sea. If ecological damage of these sensitive undersea areas comes to light after mining begins, they don’t want to be a part of it.”

“Few thought the failure of a midsize regional bank posed a risk to the entire U.S. economy until last month, and it would be reasonable to expect that regulators in the future may lean on the systemic-risk exception in the law to once again justify bailouts,” said Berkeley Law professor Prasad Krishnamurthy.

Dean Erwin Chemerinksy writes about two cases to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the First Amendment and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 

Berkeley Law Professor Daniel Farber, discusses the Trump indictment.

Bragg “has fired a strong opening shot,” said Daniel Farber, a professor at the UC Berkeley Law School who studies presidential power. “But it’s only the beginning of the battle.”

“The prosecutor’s statement of facts tells a powerful story about a conspiracy to falsify business records for political gain,” said Daniel Farber, a UC Berkeley law professor. “But serious political misconduct doesn’t necessarily equate to a criminal offense, let alone a felony. The prosecutor’s challenge will be to prove fraudulent intent … and to connect this conduct to a separate crime.”

Host Bakari Sellers is joined by Amanda Tyler, author and professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, to discuss Donald Trump’s unprecedented legal troubles, co-authoring Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s final book, Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue, and life lessons learned during the final months of Ginsburg’s life.

“With coordinated global reform, we can fight climate change while mining as sustainably as possible,” writes Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. “We simply do not have an alternative if we are serious about tackling the climate crisis in an equitable and humane way.”

“The indictment of a former president of the United States is unprecedented,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But Donald Trump is unprecedented. There is much to be worried about in setting a precedent for the criminal prosecution of a former president. But it would be much worse to conclude that anyone, including the president, is above the law.”

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law discusses autonomous vehicles.

“I know some disagree and claim a right to shout down speakers, writes Dean Chemerinsky. “But the only way my speech can be free tomorrow is to support protection for speech that I dislike today. I also am hopeful that there is a benefit in hearing views different from our own, though it can be unsettling and even painful.”

UC Berkley School of Law’s Dean Erwin Chemerinsky joins Morning Joe to discuss a recent protest at Stanford University when Trump-appointed judge Kyle Duncan spoke at the school.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law discusses plans for more solar in California’s San Joaquin Valley and the key barrier to building in the region.

Erik Stallman, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that Judge Gregory Katsas seemed to want to bifurcate the standards into different groups: Incorporated standards that impose a clear legal duty are more likely to be fair use, while those that are just explanatory may fall on the side of stronger copyright protection.

“No question there are a lot of minimum labor law standards in California, and I understand why employers find them onerous to comply with, not to mention expensive,” said UC Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a group of California labor and employment law professors opposed to Prop. 22. She added that she’s “disappointed” by the appeals court decision.

“The ruling means pregnant people no longer have to wait until “their life is literally on the line” to legally qualify for an abortion,” said Khiara M. Bridges, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “But it’s a narrow win because people trying to avoid a potentially life-threatening pregnancy make up a small proportion of those seeking abortions.”

“Banks and regulators will make mistakes, and banks should be allowed to fail, writes Prasad Krishnamurthy, professor at Berkeley Law.” “We need a system in which shareholders and debtholders bear the cost of failure, depositors are made whole and don’t panic, and banks and depositors pay for the insurance they receive at rates that are proportional to their risk.” 

Professor of Law Khiara M. Bridges joins host Lindsay Langholz for a conversation about forced birth in America and what it means for pregnant people, families, and the law when forced birth becomes a banality.

Professor of Law Catherine Fisk discusses California’s Prop. 22 and Assembly Bill No. 5.

“For decades, conservatives have preached judicial restraint and deference to the political process, write Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Catherine Fisk of Berkeley Law. “But that doesn’t seem to apply when they don’t like government regulation of business. They will surely use the 9th Circuit’s new decision and its fallacious reasoning to challenge a myriad of essential regulations needed to protect workers and consumers.”

“L.A. and other local governments should be required to loosen development and zoning restrictions near rail stops, eliminating nitpicky requirements and endless hearings,” writes Ethan N. Elkind, director of the climate program at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. “With the region experiencing a major housing shortfall and sky-high prices that have pushed lower-income residents to other regions and states or, in too many cases, the streets, allowing more dense, accessible housing is a humanitarian need as much as a transit one.”

Dean Chemerinsky discusses the continued conservative attacks on abortion rights.

David Carrillo and David A. Kaiser of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law write, “Supporters of increased affordable housing think a recently proposed initiative constitutional amendment will generate increased state power to impose building mandates on local governments. That’s unlikely to happen, because a new constitutional right to adequate housing has dim prospects in the courts.” 

2L Berkeley Law student Drake Goodson is named one of National Jurist Magazine’s Law Students of the Year.

Host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law’s Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Nazune Menka, lecturer at Berkeley Law and a supervising attorney for the campus’s Environmental Law Clinic. They talk about how to bring a decolonial lens to education, and about the joys and challenges of being a trailblazer who is pushing against the inherited wisdom and mythology surrounding UC Berkeley.

Catherine Fisk, University of California, Berkeley Law professor, and Christina Chung, UC Berkeley Center for Law and Work executive director, argue that the US Supreme Court “simply misunderstood California law on PAGA standing; California law is clear that a plaintiff may litigate a PAGA action as a representative of the state for the labor law violations suffered by others regardless of whether the plaintiff must arbitrate her own claim.”

Berkeley Law professor, Catherine Fisk comments on the decision of the California Court of appeals to uphold Prop. 22.

“This month, the leaders of Los Angeles have the opportunity to join other jurisdictions that have reformed or eliminated the deeply troubling cash bail system,” Dean Chemerinsky and co-authors Miriam Arony Krinsky and Anthony Kline write. ” If they don’t, the courts should act to address a flawed and disturbing bail system that simply keeps those without resources in jail without any public safety benefit.”

“One-ninth of the country’s population is in California, so I understand why (antiabortion activists) would want to bring the fight here,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. “But given the law in this state, and given the politics of the state, it’s hard to imagine them making much inroads here. I don’t think anyone really regards California as a battleground state with regards to abortion rights.”

Host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law’s Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews professor Khiara M. Bridges, a powerful public intellectual who speaks and writes about race, class, reproductive justice and the intersection of the three.

Ethan Elkind, who watches California transportation issues as director of the climate change program at UC Berkeley’s law school, said the mounting problems cloud the project’s future. “It is in jeopardy,” Elkind said. “It is dicey. There is no path forward for the full Los Angeles to San Francisco system. It is important that they get something done.”

“The agreement of the North Carolina Supreme Court to rehear the case doesn’t change the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. “But if the North Carolina Supreme Court were to overrule the earlier decision, and so that the earlier decision no longer stands, then the Supreme Court could say this controversy is moot and wouldn’t have jurisdiction.” 

Dean Chemerinsky said he believes there is a strong legal argument that assault weapons, as defined by California, are particularly dangerous and subject to regulation, and he hopes the higher courts will see it that way too.

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment discusses some of the issues for EV infrastructure and possible solutions.

The International Human Rights Law Clinic’s 2020 Living with Impunity report is cited in the article. 

David Nahmias, a staff attorney with the UC Berkeley Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice, told Insider following the arguments that he was “pleased to see that standing figured prominently in the oral arguments.”

“It’s a serious complaint, but whether the suit is viable depends on whether TikTok is intercepting the communications,” Orin Kerr, a well-known law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Forbes. “It’s not a wiretap violation to have the capacity to intercept.”

“We’ve worked on a number of issues particularly relating to student loans,” said David Nahmias, staff attorney at Berkeley Law’s Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice. “Specifically we’ve filed an amicus brief in the Biden v. Nebraska case, that is challenging President Biden’s plan to cancel student debt for 40 million Americans.”. 

No matter what the U.S. Supreme Court does in the cases involving the Biden administration’s student loan relief plan, there is sure to be a major effect on many people’s lives and on the law, writes Dean Chemerinsky.

David Carrillo and David A. Kaiser of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law write, “if the U.S. Supreme Court abrogates Obergefell, as it did Roe, then the now-dormant Proposition 8 text in the California constitution will once again ban same-sex marriage in California.”

Berkeley Law Professor Jonathan Glater discusses Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan and the Supreme Court.

Professor Chris Hoofnagle discusses the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT.

David Nahmias, a staff attorney with the Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice discusses the case before the U.S. Supreme Court taking on Biden administrations student loan forgiveness program. 

David Nahmias, a staff attorney with the UC Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice discusses the Supreme Court cases challenging Biden’s student-debt-relief plan. 

Lecturer Mallika Kaur writes, survivors of sexual assault face tremendous power imbalances in the legal system. A new California law helps rebalance the scales.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law discusses new efforts by the state to decarbonize its trucking industry.

“I don’t want my critique of class-based affirmative action to be understood as a critique of poor people,” Khiara M. Bridges, a law professor at UC Berkeley School of Law tells Teen Vogue. “That being said, I do not like the narrative of class-based affirmative action, where it tells a story that race or racial problems are over… and that we are living in a world where race doesn’t matter, only class does.”

Professor Jonathan Glater writes about the pair of cases challenging the Biden administration’s student-debt relief program.

In potential capital cases, local prosecutors often follow the requests of a victim’s family when it suits their purposes, said Elisabeth Semel, a UC Berkeley law professor and co-director of the school’s Death Penalty Clinic.

“The issue about targeted recommendations that promote access to dangerous things, whether it’s illegal drugs or child sexual abuse material or things about eating disorders — all of those things about algorithms — that’s actually at stake right now before the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Pamela Samuelson, a UC Berkeley law professor and co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.

“If the state would create a program that was to benefit Black students, that would be a preference based on race and would clearly violate the state Constitution,” Chemerinsky said. “However much I agree it’s desirable, it would surely get struck down by the courts, and you’re losing time to come up with ways to benefit that group that does have a chance of succeeding.”

The Asian American Law Journal, in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Fred Korematsu’s coram nobis case, hosted its annual symposium, entitled “Let’s Get Going!: Lessons from the Young Lawyers Who Overturned Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Yasui” at Berkeley Law. The symposium featured a panel with Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law discussing the continued impact the coram nobis cases have today.

Ethan Elkind, director of Berkeley Law’s  Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law discusses lawsuits surrounding self-driving mode on cars and the recent Tesla recall.

Berkeley Law Professor Holly Doremus discusses the State of Alaska’s lawsuit to reverse the National Marine Fisheries Service’s designation of critical habitat for threatened ringed and bearded seals.

Chemerinsky believes the government will be able to continue to require licenses for weapons and prohibit those convicted of felonies from having them, though even that is facing legal challenges. We may also be able to keep guns out of “sensitive places,” such as airports, schools and courthouses.

John Yoo, the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, and Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute discusses the many legal issues such as civil liberties, censorship, and freedom that have been exposed by the pandemic and management of the pandemic.

“The forum-shopping — filing in federal court in Amarillo where this is the only judge — is really outrageous,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean at UC Berkeley and a supporter of abortion rights.

“Other potential complicating factors include the fact that the episodes investigators presumably want to question Pence about — such as Trump’s efforts to influence the counting of the votes — don’t concern conventional presidential duties typically thought to be shielded by executive privilege,” said Daniel Farber, a presidential powers expert and UC Berkeley Law professor.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Dennis Aftergut, former federal prosecutor and currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy, write “The failure of the framers to recognize the problem of domestic violence or the related danger of allowing abusers access to guns should not be permitted to prevent public protection from gun violence today. Women will needlessly die because of the Fifth Circuit’s misguided decision.”

Berkeley Law Professor Tejas Narechania discusses a study he co-authored which found that judges in the Western District of Texas, Eastern District of Texas and the District of Delaware have higher appeals and reversal rates across the board when their dockets are crowded with patent cases.

Dean of Berkeley Law Erwin Chemerinsky makes the case for diversity statements, while NYU’s Jonathan Haidt argues against them.

“Why must we wait for the next death of another unarmed Black man to galvanize the public?” writes Dean Chermerinsky. “The problems are well-documented and many solutions are apparent. If the courts and the legislatures continue to do nothing, nothing will change.”

Dean Chemerinsky writes about the question of when state governments have standing to sue the United States.

“Slang amongst Black people is a love language and I am frustrated when that slang becomes appropriated and used by others and the meaning morphs,” said Khiara M. Bridges, author and professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. “There’s something really sinister about this term not only being taken from us but also deployed against us. It’s a double violation.”

Mark Cohen, senior fellow and director of the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, says while the measure is warranted in some cases, it could undermine US standing in global trade rules and lead to retaliation against US companies from other governments.

“It’s clear that Biden is going to have a lasting influence on the 9th Circuit by virtue of who he has picked. He certainly has enhanced the diversity,” said UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

Dean Chemerinsky discusses the history of policing powers and his book Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights.

UC Berkeley law professor Robert Bartlett said Musk’s way of disseminating corporate news is so far out of the norm that it’s hard to see his tweets as not being very intentional.

Mark Cohen, senior fellow and director of the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology writes about the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed ban of non-compete agreements in America and argues non-compete agreements are critical in protecting US trade secrets.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law discusses the hope and limitations of green aviation technology and how we can reduce our carbon footprint when we fly.

“Some students have come to do their LL.M. here because their country is in an earlier phase of developing their technology-related laws and find it helpful to see how the U.S. has approached similar issues,” says Wayne Stacy, executive director at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law and Technology in California. “Other students come from countries where the body of technology law has gone in a different direction than the U.S. and they appreciate learning about the contrast.”

David Nahmias, a staff attorney with the UC Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice discusses the case to block Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.

Michael Kiparsky, water program director at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law discusses groundwater recharge projects.

“Professor Bradt is ideally suited for this role,” Dean Chemerinsky said in an email. “It is a terrific honor to be chosen and a great opportunity for him.”

Berkeley Law professor Kenneth Ayotte discusses the way controversial out-of-court deals are influencing Chapter 11 transactions.

“Lower-wage earners and people from minority and economically disadvantaged backgrounds largely don’t have the experience, time, money or access to counsel to challenge noncompetes,” said Des Lafleur, a clinical teaching fellow at UC Berkeley School of Law.

“The need for a special prosecutor was of course magnified by the earlier appointment of another one, Jack Smith, to look into Trump’s improper possession and handling of classified documents,” writes Dean Chemerinksy. “But there are crucial differences between the cases.”

It’s also easier for companies and the public to blame theft for store closures and retail struggles than admit stores’ over-expansion, strategy mistakes and customers abandoning stores for online shopping, said Jonathan Simon, a criminal justice professor at UC Berkeley School of Law. “It’s much more convenient if we can blame it on people we already consider reprehensible,” he said.

In conversation with Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of UC Berkeley School of Law, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar discussed soaking up every Supreme Court argument during the two years she clerked for Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.

Holly Doremus, a water rights expert and professor of environmental regulation at the Berkeley School Law discusses the cut backs on water imported to growers in California’s Imperial Valley from the Colorado River.

Thanks to climate change, “we have and will continue to have too much water when we don’t want it and not enough when we do, and so storage is the key,” said Michael Kiparsky, water program director at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at University of California, Berkeley School of Law. “The fact that we’ve created this massive space underground holds the key to that problem.” 

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the University of California, Berkeley, Center for Law, Energy & the Environment discusses the recent controversy over gas vs. electric cooktops.

The report’s findings could potentially help support climate litigation against Exxon, Daniel Farber, professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, told CNN. “The more we learn about industry deception, the stronger the legal claims will be.” 

Dean Chemerinsky discusses his recent book Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism.

The Chronicle’s Bob Egelko reviews Dean Chemerinsky’s latest book, “A Momentous Year in the Supreme Court.”

The Supreme Court’s focus on the major questions doctrine could make the FTC’s clear power to issue the rule irrelevant, said Catherine Fisk, a workplace law professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

“Sometimes an especially momentous U.S. Supreme Court term is followed by a quieter year with fewer blockbuster decisions,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “But that is not what we should expect when the court hands down its rulings for this term in spring 2023.”

“It’s long past time for all Supreme Court proceedings to be livestreamed over video and archived, as is done in many federal appellate courts around the country,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Yet the high court has traditionally refused to allow any broadcasting of audio or video of its proceedings.”

Lecturer Mallika Kaur talks to Judge Abby Abinante about about negotiating trauma and the law.

“The five conservative justices based their decision not on the purpose of Title 42, which is to stop the spread of a communicable disease, but on their partisan agreement with conservatives on immigration issues,” writes Dean Chemerinksy. “We should expect better of the court than that.”

Berkeley Law Professor Khiara M. Bridges discusses the biggest takeaways from 2022 and what to expect in 2023.

“Affordable housing, not handcuffs, is the only humane, effective and lawful solution to homelessness,” writes Jeffrey Selbin the Chancellor’s Clinical Professor of Law and co-director of the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

“This will allow us to strengthen our already outstanding criminal justice faculty, which are widely regarded as among the very best in the country,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Barry Tarlow was an eminent criminal defense attorney, and I am thrilled that we will honor his legacy by having a permanent chair named in his memory.”

“We know that the vast majority of people in pretrial detention in California are people of color, particularly Black and brown individuals,” said Rachel Wallace, clinical supervisor at UC Berkeley Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic. “And so we know that this is not only an economic issue, but a racial justice issue as well.”

“The Roberts court, more than any other court in history, uses its docket-setting discretion to select cases that allow it to revisit and overrule precedent,” Berkeley Law Professor Tejas Narechania found in the study, which will be published in the St. Louis University Law Journal and built on an earlier one in the Columbia Law Review.

Savala Nolan, Executive Director of the Henderson Center for Social Justice, reviews three books covering personal reflections by three women about art and adversity, fat-phobia and diaspora.

“Revising the Electoral Count Act will not remedy other problems in our electoral system, especially the many state laws designed to disenfranchise minority voters,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “Congress must also pass legislation to further protect voting rights, but that seems unlikely given the likelihood that Senate Republicans would filibuster such a bill.”

Dean Chemerinsky said the appellate court should uphold the decision because “the 1929 statute was the basis for the 1952 reenactment, and it’s the basis of the law that exists today.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor John A. Powell discuss the passage of the “Respect for Marriage Act” in Congress.

UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who chaired the city’s elected charter reform commission in 1999, said he thought the new proposal was a great idea, noting his commission had initially proposed an independent redistricting panel before the current structure was created.

“Does a state supreme court have the power to find that an act of the state legislature violates the state constitution? The answer to that question should be clear and obvious, but the conservative justices of the Supreme Court expressed doubt about it at oral arguments in Moore vs. Harper on Wednesday,” writes Dean Chemerinsky. “It is not hyperbole to say that the future of American democracy may turn on the court’s answer.”

“The Constitution and American democracy would not survive another four years of Trump being president,” writes Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and professor of law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. “We now have Trump’s own words to prove it.”

A study from Berkeley Judicial Institute on law clerk selection and diversity is discussed. 

Dean Chemerinsky discusses rankings at US News.

Des Lafleur, a business attorney and lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Law who consults with companies on minimizing risk, said cybersecurity is something companies should be thinking about well before employees depart the company.

“There is always a tension between liberty and equality. Any law that prohibits discrimination limits the freedom to discriminate.” writes Dean Chemerinksy.

“The system is not set up to deal with the underlying problems. It’s set up to deal with the legal problems,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge in San Jose who now heads the Berkeley Judicial Institute at UC Berkeley School of Law. “The system is in some ways rigid and inflexible.”

“The judges we interviewed were thoughtful, sincere, and serious about their commitment to law clerk diversity as each of them defines it,” said the study’s co-author, former California federal Judge and head of the Berkeley Judicial Institute at UC Berkeley School of Law Jeremy Fogel. “The challenge for many of them is translating that commitment into specific practices that actually achieve the outcomes they seek.” 

“Boosting public transit could also have the added environmental benefit of limiting the production of new electric vehicles,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. “Cars take a lot of energy to manufacture and dispose of, and while electricity is a much cleaner fuel than petroleum, it’s far better to avoid buying a car in the first place,” he said. 

The Berkeley Judicial Institute’s new study on law clerk diversity is featured.

“It is much too soon to know what the impact of these developments will be on law schools and legal education,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean at UC Berkeley’s law school.

Dean Chemerinsky writes about two arguments in the Supreme Court.

Dean Chemerinksy discusses originalism and the Supreme Court.

“It came as no surprise in 2015 when the Department of Justice decided to close the criminal investigation in the United States and decided not to pursue charges against the agents,” said Berkeley Law’s International Human Rights Law Clinic co-director Roxanna Altholz.

The Humphrey Report from UC Berkeley School of Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic is cited in an editorial on bail in California.

Dean Chemerinsky’s book Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism is included in David Lat’s spotlight of noteworthy new books about or related to the law.

Jeff Selbin, the director of the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law discusses California’s new law that will automatically seal most criminal records for those who complete their sentences.

 Berkeley Law professor John Yoo  said, the enactment of Proposition 209 kept the goal of racial diversity on the university’s front burner. “In a way it became culturally more deeply rooted now at the university than it was back in 1996,” he said.

“For years, CBP has also struggled with fully investigating and disciplining  its own agents for using excessive force on the job,” said Roxanna Altholz, co-director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. “Federal law prohibits victims from successfully filing civil lawsuits against Border Patrol agents, making accountability of them even more difficult.”

UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who has argued cases before the Supreme Court, said its past rulings on health issues, particularly the 2012 decision upholding most of the federal health care law, probably wouldn’t weaken the legal case for abortion rights.

“Sometimes rankings can do more harm than good,” said Dean Chemerinsky. “If the rankings are measuring the wrong things, then they’re not providing the right information.” 

“In Silicon Valley, there has historically been a don’t follow the rules mentality, because that’s how you get ahead,” said Steven Davidoff Solomon of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law. “Holmes may be the first, but I suspect there are going to be more.”

Berkeley Law’s dean Erwin Chemerinsky, along with University of Wisconsin’s Law School dean Daniel Tokaji, write about the ABA’s proposal to eliminate standardized tests for law school admissions. “At a minimum, we need more study and more data on the potential impact of such a radical change in admissions standards to avoid potential consequences to diversity, equity, and inclusion that are the opposite of what is intended,” write Chemerinsky and Tokaji.

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.”

“There is a longstanding history of the military not being held accountable for sexual assaults that take place under its watch,” said Rose Carmen Goldberg, a veterans law lecturer at the University of California School of Law.

“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.”