Christopher Edley Jr.

Edley was a renowned figure in administrative law, education policy, and civil rights — including stints in White House policy and budget positions under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — before coming to Berkeley Law as dean in 2004.

His nine-year tenure was transformative, bolstering the law school’s faculty, creating new research centers, and building its South Addition while emphasizing its role in advancing the public interest. After his 2024 death, the Edley Center on Law & Democracy was founded in his memory.

When Edley arrived at Berkeley Law in 2004 after 23 years at Harvard Law School, he’d already had an extraordinarily distinguished career. 

He’d worked in the administration of President Jimmy Carter, with a portfolio including welfare reform, Social Security, food and nutrition programs, and several other anti-poverty agencies. At Harvard Law School, he’d been a beloved and influential professor and founded the Harvard Civil Rights Project. 

In the 1990s, he took a leave to go back to the White House under President Bill Clinton, overseeing budgets and legislative initiatives for five cabinet departments — Justice, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Treasury — spanning more than 40 independent agencies. He also directed a government-wide review of affirmative action programs as a senior adviser to Clinton.

Edley served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, including when the agency probed irregularities in Florida during the closely contested 2000 presidential election, and advised Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama, Michael Dukakis, Howard Dean, and Al Gore in addition to Clinton and Carter. 

​​“Chris Edley had a brilliant mind and a kind, good heart that he put to use to build a better, fairer, more just America,” Clinton said in a statement after Edley’s death in 2024. “He always believed that law and policy are ultimately about people. He mastered the minute details but never lost sight of the big picture — giving more people the chance to live their best lives.”

During his tenure as Berkeley Law’s dean, Edley was co-chair of the congressionally chartered National Commission on Education Equity and Excellence, leading its charge to recommend pathways for reform and steering a nationwide follow-up effort to advance those recommendations.

He also served as interim dean for UC Berkeley’s School of Education — a role he stepped into at the request of then-Chancellor Carol Christ — from 2021 to 2023. In that position, Edley helped formalize the school’s undergraduate major in education and the school officially became the Berkeley School of Education after having served only graduate students for more than 50 years.

At the law school, Edley emphasized it should be not just a place of scholarly inquiry and great teaching, but also an institution dedicated to advancing the public interest. 

“The mission of a great public law school is different from that of an elite private school because we must consider not only the excellence of our training and scholarship, but also the access to and inclusiveness of our enterprise,” Edley said after being selected from a pool of more than 200 candidates. “We must also provide intellectual capital and leadership to the state, nation, and world.”

Edley made key faculty hires, established several new research centers, and created a summer public interest stipend program for students which now bears his name. He also led a major campaign that funded much-needed physical space through renovations and the South Addition — adding 55,000 square feet for new classrooms, a student center, library expansion, and more.

“As dean, he made an enormous positive difference in every aspect of the law school,” says Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a law school classmate of Edley’s who drew wisdom and support from his predecessor. 

Edley was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Public Administration, the Gates Foundation’s National Programs Advisory Panel, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Law Institute, among other prominent organizations. He also served on many committees for the National Academies of Science’s National Research Council, a committee to evaluate performance standards and design a national system of education equity indicators.

In addition to his extensive public service and teaching, which he continued until just before he died, Edley was a prolific and influential scholar. His books and publications include 1990’s Administrative Law: Rethinking Judicial Control of Bureaucracy; Not all Black and White: Affirmative Action, Race, and American Values, published in 1996; and “Fiat Flux: Evolving Purposes and Ideals of the Great American Public Law School,” published in the California Law Review in 2012. 

After Edley’s death, Chemerinsky established the Edley Center on Law & Democracy to honor him and his lifelong commitment to public service and his conviction that law schools have a duty to serve the populace. 

“Chris Edley was a relentless force for good in the world — the good he accomplished directly and the good that he empowered other people to do,” Berkeley Law Professor Molly Van Houweling says. “He set an example of how to make a complicated world better with grit and good cheer.” 

About the Series

The Legends of Berkeley Law series highlights scholars whose ideas helped establish one of the world’s most intellectually influential law schools. Through pathbreaking research, innovative teaching, and institutional leadership, these faculty members reshaped major fields of law and inspired generations of lawyers, judges, policymakers, and academics.