David Oppenheimer

David B. Oppenheimer is a Clinical Professor of Law.

He serves as the Faculty Co-Director of the Pro Bono Program, and the Director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality & Anti-discrimination Law. The center brings together over 500 scholars, activists, NGO workers, government anti-discrimination agency lawyers and officials, PhD candidates and other graduate students, and legal practitioners from six continents, to address the problems of systemic inequality and discrimination. Its principal mission is to expand our understanding of inequality and discrimination through the tools of comparative legal studies, and to transfer that knowledge from those who study inequality to those who enforce anti-discrimination law.

Following his graduation from Harvard Law School, Professor Oppenheimer clerked for California Chief Justice Rose Bird. He then worked as a staff attorney for the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, prosecuting discrimination cases, and was the founding director of the Boalt Hall Employment Discrimination Clinic. In addition to Berkeley Law, he has taught at the University of San Francisco, Golden Gate University (where he served as Associate Dean), the University of Paris (Sorbonne-Pantheon), the University of Bologna, LUMSA University Roma, and the Paris Institute of Political Science (“Sciences Po”).

Professor Oppenheimer has presented scholarly papers on discrimination law at many universities, including Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Duke, Oxford, the Paris Institute of Political Science, the University of Heidelberg, Humboldt University Berlin, the Sorbonne, the University of Stockholm, the University of Melbourne, Trinity College Dublin, the University of New South Wales, the University of Buenos Aires, and Hong Kong University, and at the annual meetings of the Association of American Law Schools, the American Political Science Association and the International Academy of Comparative Law. He has published articles on discrimination law in the Pennsylvania Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, the Columbia Journal of Human Rights Law, the Berkeley Women’s Law Journal, the Harvard Latinx Law Review, the Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law, Droit et Cultures, and many others.

Professor Oppenheimer is the author of The Ubiquity of Positive Measures for Addressing Systemic Discrimination and Inequality: A Comparative Global Perspective (Brill 2019), a co-author of the casebook Comparative Equality & Anti-Discrimination Law (3d ed. Edward Elgar 2020), a co-editor of Comparative Perspectives on the Enforcement and Effectiveness of Antidiscrimination Law: Challenges and Innovative Tools (Springer 2018), and the co-author of several sets of teaching materials, including Patt v. Donner: A Simulated Casefile for Learning Civil Procedure (2d ed. Foundation Press 2019) and the trial advocacy case file Rowe v. Pacific Quad (6th ed. 2019 NITA). He was a contributor to MacKinnon and Siegel’s Directions in Sexual Harassment Law (Yale University Press 2003), Guiomard and Robin-Olivier’s Diversite et discriminations raciales: une perspective transatlantique (Dalloz 2009), and Friedman’s Employment Discrimination Stories (Foundation Press 2006). His co-authored book, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (with M. Brown, M. Carnoy, E. Currie, T. Duster, M. Schultz and D. Wellman) (University of California Press 2003) won the 2004 Benjamin L. Hooks outstanding book award.

He teaches Civil Procedure, Evidence, and Comparative Equality & Anti-Discrimination Law.

Education

B.A., University without Walls (Berkeley) (1972)
J.D., Harvard Law School (1978)