Jeffrey Selbin

Jeffrey Selbin is a clinical professor of law and directs the Policy Advocacy Clinic. From 2014 to 2017, Selbin served as co-faculty director of the Henderson Center for Social Justice, and from 2006 to 2015, he served as faculty director of the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), Berkeley’s community-based clinic. Selbin founded EBCLC’s HIV/AIDS Law Project in 1990 as a Skadden Fellow, and served as EBCLC’s Executive Director from 2002 through 2006. During the 2010-11 academic year, Selbin was a visiting clinical professor at Yale Law School.

Selbin is active in local and national clinical legal education and anti-poverty efforts. He chaired the Poverty Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and co-chaired the Lawyering in the Public Interest (Bellow Scholar) Committee of the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education. He currently serves as an elected member of the Clinical Law Review Editorial Board, and served two terms as an elected member of the board of directors of the Clinical Legal Education Association. From 2004 to 2006, Selbin served on the California State Bar Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services, dedicated to improving and increasing access to justice for low-income Californians.

Selbin’s research interests include clinical education and community lawyering, with an emphasis on evidence-based approaches. He is co-author of the casebook “Poverty Law, Policy, and Practice” (with Juliet Brodie, Clare Pastore and Ezra Rosser). Other recent publications include: “Measuring Law School Clinics” in the Tulane Law Review (2018 with Colleen Shanahan, Anna Carpenter & Alyx Mark); “Unmarked? Criminal Record Clearing and Employment Outcomes” in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (2017 with Justin McCrary & Joshua Epstein); “Eleanor Swift’s Indelible Public Interest Legacy at Berkeley Law” in the California Law Review (2017); “Poverty Law: United States” in the International Encyclopedia of Social & Behavioral Sciences (2015 with Scott L. Cummings); and “The Clinic Lab Office” in the Wisconsin Law Review (2013 with Jeanne Charn).

Selected recent reports published by the Policy Advocacy Clinic include: “Homeless Exclusion Districts: How California Business Improvement Districts Use Policy Advocacy and Policing Practices to Exclude Homeless People from Public Space” (forthcoming 2018); “Making Families Pay: The Harmful, Unlawful and Costly Practice of Charging Juvenile Administrative Fees in California” (2017); and “California’s New Vagrancy Laws: The Growing Enactment and Enforcement of Anti-Homeless Laws in the Golden State” (2015 & 2016).

In 2018, Selbin received the Society of American Law Teachers Great Teacher Award and the U.C. Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Community Engaged Teaching. He has been recognized as a Northern California “Super Lawyer” by Law & Politics and the publishers of San Francisco Magazine (multiple years); was named a Wasserstein Fellow, honoring outstanding public interest lawyers, by Harvard Law School (2004); and was selected as a Bellow Scholar by the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education for his anti-poverty and access-to-justice efforts (2003).

Education

B.A., University of Michigan (1983)
C.E.P., L'Institut d'Etudes Politiques (1986)
J.D., Harvard University (1989)