• 

  Albiston Cited in Supreme Court Opinion

  A 2007 UCLA Law Review article by Professor Catherine Albiston J.D. ’93 Ph.D. ’01 was cited in a recent U.S. Supreme Court opinion.  In a 7-2 decision in Lackey v. Stinnie, the Court held that plaintiffs who won preliminary injunctive relief in a civil rights enforcement action under Section 1983 that later became moot cannot obtain attorney fees as prevailing parties. The Court ruled that plaintiffs can recover fees only if “a court grants enduring judicial relief that materially alters the legal relationship between the parties,” even if the defendant acted unilaterally to moot the case before plaintiffs could obtain a final judgment. In a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cites Albiston’s article with Laura Beth Nielsen, “The Procedural Attack on Civil Rights: The Empirical Reality of Buckhannon for the Private Attorney General,” to refute the majority’s take that the ruling will have little to no impact.
• 

  Should the Stored Communications Act Trump California Law?

  UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, Professor Rebecca Wexler, and Criminal Law & Justice Center Executive Director Chesa Boudin recently filed an amicus curiae brief in a case now before the California Supreme Court that turns on whether a federal law prevents criminal defendants from subpoenaing evidence they need to defend themselves.
• 

  Center Hosts Powerhouse Conference

  UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Private Law Theory recently hosted the North American Workshop on Private Law Theory for the first time, welcoming a stellar group of scholars from around the world to discuss research works in progress. The workshop’s 11th annual meeting included the revival of its John G. Fleming Award, given to University of Toronto Professor Ernest Weinrib for his tort law contributions.
• 

  Stellar ESG Scholarship

  As part of its annual Berkeley Forum for Corporate Governance, the Berkeley Center for Law and Business hosted an academic symposium focused on ESG — which stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance — topics in business law. In partnership with the  European Corporate Governance Institute, the symposium included a Best Paper Award, which includes a $10,000 prize. Three winners were selected from more than 70 articles submitted by scholars from all over the world.
• 

  Scrutinizing Stipulated Protective Orders

  Stipulated protective orders, or SPOs, seal discovery information in a civil lawsuit from the public and have become increasingly common in recent decades. In a new paper in the Duke Law Journal using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, Professor Jonah B. Gelbach and a team of co-authors show that not only are these orders frequently granted, they’re rarely subjected to the type of judicial scrutiny Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(c)trequires — hiding potentially deadly defects and abuse from the public. 

More recent research