The class featured guest appearances from leading practitioners and thinkers with a focus on how CEOs, chief legal officers, and corporate boards are responding to AI’s disruptive potential.
Before law school, 1Ls Kamryn Yanchick and Aidan Lin-Tostado were already turning advocacy into action. As Berkeley Law Public Interest Scholars, they’re now building on that work while preparing for careers in public service.
With the climate for judges becoming increasingly fraught, Hiramoto prioritizes her passions as a jurist: pursuing justice in her courtroom while paving the way for new generations of judges, lawyers, and students.
From Silicon Valley startups to established corporate pillars, alums in high-level legal roles are propelling meaningful change in areas such as electric vehicles, finance, consumer goods, and social media.
Atkinson, whose scholarship examines consumer law through the lens of economic inequality, is enjoying the chance to work more closely with her colleagues, particularly junior faculty.
In Berkeley Law’s mentorship series, lecturer Talha Syed and Zara Tayebjee ’26 discuss office hours, the Socratic Method, and how a half-hour conversation about a pen helped shape a student’s intellectual path.
“It really is tremendously hard on almost anybody when you get the kinds of threats that people are getting now — the language and the specific threats that are made. The impact on the judges, the impact on the judges’ families and loved ones, the impact just on the routines of their life, I think that’s underreported,” said Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute which published the report “Threats to the Independence of the Federal Judiciary,” along with New York University School of Law’s Rule of Law Lab.
Judge Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute said lawyers have “a direct stake in an independent judiciary and in the rule of law and in public confidence in the system” and can help explain concepts such as judicial independence, checks and balances and the constitutional role of the courts to the public.
“The Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday allowing President Trump’s executive order on mail voting to go forward is stunningly insensitive to the context: Trump is trying to exercise control over elections when he has absolutely no authority to do so,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.
