Media Highlights

Elena Chachko, a law professor at UC Berkeley Law School, said that both Trump and Biden employed emergency power in broad and ambitious ways. When it comes to the president’s power, Chachko said the court is typically a check on the executive branch.

“Over time you’ll see even more insurance company insolvencies, more insurance price increases and less insurance availability, more mortgage defaults, and falls in asset values and credit freezes; as opposed to a single catastrophic event or events where a bunch of financial institutions nationally go down at once,” said Dave Jones, director Climate Risk Initiative, CLEE. Although, he added, “There is some risk of that as well.” 

Professor Khiara M. Bridges joins NPR’s It’s Been A Minute to discuss the the case of Adriana Smith’s pregnancy in which after being declared brain dead, a Georgia hospital kept her on life support without her family’s consent because of the state’s abortion laws

“Wagner has deftly leveraged information and communications technologies to cultivate and promote its global brand as ruthless mercenaries. Their Telegram network in particular, which depicts their conduct across the Sahel, serves as a proud public display of their brutality,” said Lindsay Freeman, director of the Technology, Law & Policy program at the Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley School of Law.

“It is not clear what exactly the law prescribes and permits in cases like this,” Khiara M. Bridges, a University of California, Berkeley law professor, told HuffPost. “In an abundance of caution, risk-averse doctors and hospital counsel will do exactly what they did in Smith’s case.”

“We see AGs banding together, governors banding together, as advocates work on the ground,” said Arneta Rogers, executive director of the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at UC Berkeley’s law school. “That feels somewhat more hopeful — that people are thinking about a coordinated strategy.” 

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, said the Supreme Court has made it clear that it is hostile to policies that include “racial preference,” even those that are meant to remediate past instances of discrimination. They could be declared unconstitutional, he said

Scholars from the California Constitution Center at the UC Berkeley School of Law submitted an amicus curiae brief siding with Gov. Gavin Newsom in the lawsuit, Newsom v. Trump, regarding the federalization of the California National Guard.

“The crucial question … is whether the judges seem inclined to accept Trump’s argument that he alone gets to decide if the statutory requirements for nationalizing the California national guard are met,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law.

“Unfortunately, the opinion establishes that courts now have discretion whether or not to analyze under heightened scrutiny a law that treats men and women differently,” said Professor Russell K. Robinson. “This creates an opening for justices to rely on policy arguments instead of legal principles.”

“What’s important to remember is that criminalization is not a solution to homelessness,” UC Berkeley Law Assistant Dean of Clinical Education Laura Riley said. “It’s a way to hide homelessness from view of people who are housed.”

Professor David Hausman discusses the state of immigration in the United States.

“The administration is constructing the visual spectacle to accompany its assertion of an ‘insurrection’ demanding a militarized response,” said Leti Volpp, a professor of immigration law at the University of California at Berkeley. “The administration wants the American public to take away from these videos the sense that immigrants are completely dehumanized ‘bad people’ who need to be removed from this country; their continued presence threatens law and order.”

Catherine Crump, technology law professor at UC Berkeley School of Law gives insight on location data tech used to track dissidents. 

“The discount is nice and it’s a positive development, but it doesn’t matter if they won’t write you the insurance,” says Dave Jones, former insurance commissioner of California and now director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley Law.

“This view of women and women’s roles is precisely what feminists reacted against in the mid-19th century, and then again in the 1960s and 1970s,” said Professor Khiara M. Bridges.

New research by Professor Ofer Eldar and Mark Ørberg unpacks the economic rationales behind nonprofit business ownership, challenge the idea that it’s all about purpose, & highlight the overlooked risks of nonprofit control.

Elena Chachko, an assistant professor of law at Berkeley Law School, says it’s the president’s pushing of boundaries — and the legal challenges that follow — that will ultimately define how emergency powers can be used.
“This is what happens when you take an instrument that has been very useful for many administrations, for many years, and now you overextend it,” she says. “You use it to do novel things with questionable legal basis, and what you do is invite pushback and invite criticism and invite limitations.”

Professor Katerina Linos weighs in on potential legal challenges to President Trump’s travel ban affecting 12 countries.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky speaks with Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd about Trump’s new travel ban and student visa restrictions.

What is due process? Dean Chemerinsky helps answer that question.

Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment weighs in as California considers a major overhaul of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

Professor Amanda Tyler, constitutional law expert and expert on habeas corpus, says today’s fight over government power to detain people without due process could foreshadow a historic constitutional crisis.

“Imagine Elizabeth Holmes being pardoned and then immediately headlining the world’s biggest biotech summit. Would never happen,” said UC Berkeley Law lecturer Hermine Wong.

Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute discusses the growing call for judges to control their security force.

Can Trump suspend habeas corpus? Professor Amanda Tyler weighs in.

“Members of the founding generation referred to habeas as ‘essential to freedom,’” says Amanda Tyler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. As such, she adds, they expected habeas to be suspended “only in the most dramatic of circumstances.”

A new report from UC Berkeley Law looks at how the legal landscape has changed in the past year. KQED housing affordability reporter Vanessa Rancaño spoke with Laura Riley, Assistant Dean of Clinical Education at Berkeley Law, about what she and her students found.

Expedited removal was used in ~7% of ICE arrests in the first month of the new admin, slightly up from 2024, per data from UC Berkeley Law Assistant Professor David Hausman and the Data Deportation Project.

“It’s an attempt to intimidate potential critics,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law.

“How Texas deals with this question is going to be very critical on how people see Texas, moving forward, and how people see Delaware, moving forward, and ultimately how they see corporations,” said Professor Stavros Gadinis. “I don’t think that Texas courts would necessarily be willing to be aligned with Delaware.”

Amanda Tyler, a constitutional law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, called habeas corpus “one of the single most foundational aspects of American law and the American constitution.”

“Insurance is the climate crisis canary in the coal mine, and the canary is dying,” said Dave Jones, director of the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, Center for Law, Energy and the Environment.

“It was thought to be a wacky idea that only political philosophers would buy. They’ve finally got a president who agrees,” said Professor John Yoo.

“All of this adds to a sense of the judiciary being under attack,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former judge in California who now runs the Berkeley Judicial Institute. “Whether or not it’s going to be successful, it’s seen as part of a broader attempt to weaken or delegitimize the judiciary.”