Faculty

Kenneth A. Bamberger

Kenneth A. Bamberger is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Professor of Law at Berkeley Law. He is an expert on government regulation and corporate compliance, especially with regard to issues of technology, free expression, and information privacy. In 2016, he and Professor Deirdre Mulligan were awarded the Privacy Leadership Award by the International Association of Privacy Professionals for their comparative study of privacy regimes and corporate privacy practices, Privacy on the Ground: Driving Corporate Behavior in the United States and Europe. His current work focuses on the governance of technology design to protect public values, the ways that digital platforms affect markets and consumers, and the meaning of cybersecurity Publications, courses, and more »

 

Elena Chachko

Elena Chachko is an Assistant Professor at Berkeley Law. Before joining the faculty, she was the inaugural Rappaport Fellow at Harvard Law and a Miller fellow at Berkeley Law. Professor Chachko’s research explores the intersection of law and geopolitics. Chachko’s scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the American Journal of International Law, the California Law Review, the UC Davis Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, the Stanford Technology Law Review, and the Yale Journal of International Law, among other publications. Her research has won several awards, including the 2020 Mike Lewis Prize for national security law scholarship, the Harvard Law School Irving Oberman constitutional law writing prize, and the Harvard Law School Mancini writing prize. She is a member of the Berkeley Working Group on Emerging Technology Governance under the leadership of Secretary Janet Napolitano and Professor Andrew Reddy at the Goldman School of Public Policy.

 

Colleen ChienColleen Chien teaches and conducts cross-disciplinary research on innovation, intellectual property, and the criminal justice system, with a focus on how technology, data, and innovation can be harnessed to achieve their potential for social benefit. With a law degree from Berkeley Law and engineering and humanities degrees from Stanford, Chien is known for her in-depth empirical studies of patent litigation, patent-assertion entities (PAEs) (a term that she coined), the secondary market for patents, and, in the criminal justice realm, on the “second chance” gap between those eligible for and receiving relief from the criminal justice system. Prior to joining Berkeley Law, Chien was Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law. She previously served as Senior Advisor for Intellectual Property and Innovation in the Obama White House and currently advises the US Patent and Trademark Office as a Marian Croak Distinguished Scholar. Chien is among the top 20-cited intellectual property and cyberlaw scholars in the US and has been named one of Silicon Valley’s “Women of Influence,” and one of the 50 Most Influential People in Intellectual Property in the world.

 

catherinecrumpheadshot

Catherine Crump is Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic and Clinical Professor of Law. Her work focuses on the application of First and Fourth Amendment principles to government use of new technologies, in particular to government surveillance. She has litigated cases in state and federal court and testified before state legislatures, Congress, and the European Parliament. Recent projects include a focus on street-level policing, including deployment of police body-worn cameras and the use of GPS tracking on youth in the juvenile justice system. Follow her at @CatherineNCrumpPublications, courses, and more »

 

Catherine FiskCatherine Fisk is the Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law. She teaches courses on the law of work, and also on the legal profession and freedom of speech and association. She writes in the fields of labor and employment, employee-generated intellectual property, sociolegal history, and the legal profession. Professor Fisk has written several major works on employer-employee disputes over intellectual property, including Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (UNC Press 2009), which won prizes from the American Historical Association and the American Society for Legal History.  Her current research projects include a book on labor protest in the mid-twentieth century, and works on video game writers and on governance of worker centers and labor unions. Publications, courses, and more »

 

Chris Jay HoofnagleChris Jay Hoofnagle is a teaching professor in the School of Law, with a dual appointment in the School of Information. He is an expert in information privacy law and teaches about regulation of technology. Hoofnagle’s research focuses on identity theft, security breaches, and consumer perceptions and attitudes towards privacy laws. He has written extensively in the fields of information privacy, the law of unfair and deceptive practices, consumer law, and identity theft. Professor Hoofnagle is co-founder of the Privacy Law Scholars Conference. Follow him at  @hoofnaglePublications, courses, and more »

 

Sonia Katyal

Sonia Katyal is Distinguished Haas Professor and Associate Dean, Faculty Development and Research. Her scholarly work considers intellectual property, trademarks, trade secrecy, civil rights (including gender, race and sexuality), LGBTQ rights, antidiscrimination, property theory, and innovation. Professor Katyal is the co-author of Property Outlaws (Yale University Press, 2010) (with Eduardo Peñalver), which studies the intersection between civil disobedience and innovation in property and intellectual property frameworks. In 2008, Katyal was awarded a grant from the Warhol Foundation for her forthcoming book, Contrabrand, which studies the relationship between art, advertising and trademark and copyright law. In March of 2016, Professor Katyal was selected by U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker to be part of the inaugural U.S. Commerce Department’s Digital Economy Board of Advisors. Publications, courses, and more »

 

Orin S. KerrOrin S. Kerr joined the faculty at Berkeley Law in July 2019 after teaching at USC Gould School of Law, the George Washington University Law School, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania. He has written more than 60 law review articles, over 40 of which have been cited in judicial opinions (including seven in US Supreme Court opinions). Professor Kerr has briefed and argued cases in the United States Supreme Court and three federal circuits and has testified six times before Congressional committees. In 2015, Chief Justice Roberts appointed Professor Kerr to serve on the Judicial Conference’s committee to review the Criminal Justice Act. After Circuit Court and Supreme Court clerkships, he served as a Special Assistant US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia and as a trial attorney in the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section at the US Department of Justice. Follow him @OrinKerr. Publications, courses, and more »

 

Peter S. MenellPeter S. Menell is Koret Professor of Law. Reflecting his training in science and technology, economics, and law, Professor Menell’s research focuses principally on the role and design of intellectual property law with particular emphasis on the digital technology and content industries. He has written over 100 articles and 15 books. His current projects explore intellectual property case management, judiciary reform, the scope of patentable subject matter, design protection, music copyright protection, trade secret whistleblower immunity, and technological disruption and social justice. In 2016, he founded Clause 8 Publishing, which seeks to promote the creation and dissemination of educational resources at fair prices. Publications, courses, and more »

 

Robert P. Merges

Robert P. Merges is Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Advanced Degree Programs and Global Engagement. He is the author of Justifying Intellectual Property, published by Harvard University Press in 2011. A comprehensive statement of mature views on the ethical and economic foundations of IP law, the book reviews foundational philosophical theories of property and contemporary theories about distributive justice and applies them to IP; identifies operational high-level principles of IP law; and, with all this as background, works through several pressing problems facing IP law today. Professor Merges also has undertaken extensive revisions to two of the casebooks he coauthors, to update them in light of the America Invents Act. Publications, courses, and more »

 

Deirdre K. MulliganDeirdre K. Mulligan is a Professor in the School of Information and the School of Law (by courtesy). Her research explores legal and technical means of protecting values such as privacy, freedom of expression, and fairness in emerging technical systems. In 2017, Prof. Mulligan was appointed to a three-year term as a member of DARPA’s Information Science and Technology Study Group, the first lawyer on that body in its 30 year history.  She is also currently serving a three-year term on the City of Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission. Prof. Mulligan is a founding board member of the Partnership for AI; a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder initiative to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector; and Chair Emeritus of the Board of Directors of the Center for Democracy & Technology. Publications, courses, and more »

 

Tejas N. Narechania

Tejas N. Narechania is the Robert and Nanci Corson Assistant Professor of Law. He focuses on matters related to telecommunications regulation and intellectual property. Before joining Berkeley Law, Professor Narechania clerked for Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States (2015-2016) and for Judge Diane P. Wood of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (2011-2012). He has advised the Federal Communications Commission on network neutrality matters, where he served as Special Counsel (2012-2013). Professor Narechania’s research has appeared in the Columbia Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, and the Michigan Law Review, among other venues, and his work has been cited by the White House, in the work of the Supreme Court and the federal Courts of Appeals, as well as the New York Times and the Washington Post. Publications, courses, and more »

 

brandie nonnecke headshotBrandie Nonnecke, PhD is Founding Director of the CITRIS Policy Lab, headquartered at UC Berkeley. She is an Associate Research Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP) where she directs the Tech Policy Initiative, a collaboration between CITRIS and GSPP to strengthen tech policy education, research, and impact. Brandie is the Director of Our Better Web, a program that supports empirical research, policy analysis, training, and engagement to address the sharp rise of online harms. She is a co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at Berkeley Law. She also co-directs the UC Berkeley AI Policy Hub,  an interdisciplinary initiative training researchers to develop effective AI governance and policy frameworks. Her research has been featured in Science, Wired, NPR, BBC News, MIT Technology Review, Buzzfeed News, among others. Publications, courses, and more »

 

Osagie K. ObasogieOsagie K. Obasogie is the Haas Distinguished Chair and Professor of Law at Berkeley Law with a joint appointment in the School of Public Health. Obasogie’s scholarly interests include Constitutional law, policing and police use of force, sociology of law, bioethics, race and inequality in law and medicine, and reproductive and genetic technologies. His writings have spanned both academic and public audiences. His first book, Blinded By Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind (Stanford University Press), was awarded the Herbert Jacob Book Prize. His current work examines the role of science, medicine, and medical professionals in hindering the ability to hold police officers accountable when they use excessive force; analyzes the legacy of the American eugenics movement and its contemporary impact on law, science, medicine, and technology; studies how legal doctrine produces police violence; and exposes the limitations of DNA databases when they are used in criminal investigations. Publications, courses, and more »

 

Andrea RothAndrea Roth is a Professor of Law. She joined the Boalt faculty in 2011 after a tenure as a Thomas Grey Fellow at Stanford Law School. Before Stanford, she worked for over eight years as a trial and appellate attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (PDS). At PDS she was a founding member of a Forensic Practice Group, which studied and litigated forensic DNA typing. She has lectured nationally on forensic science-related issues. She is also a member of the Constitution Project’s National Committee on DNA Collection and is an affiliate of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC) for forensic science. Her research focuses on the use of forensic science in criminal trials, the continuing viability of the lay jury, and the ways in which concepts of criminal procedure and evidentiary law must be re-theorized in an era of science-based prosecutions.
Twitter: @andrealroth. Publications, courses, and more »

 

Pamela Samuelson

Pamela Samuelson is Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information. Much of her recent work has focused on updating and adapting U.S. copyright law to meet challenges of the digital age. She has written amicus curiae briefs as well as law review and other articles on major software IP cases such as Oracle v. Google. Other recent work has focused on improving public access to mass digitized copies of in-copyright works. Professor Samuelson is co-founder and board member of Authors Alliance, a nonprofit organization that represents the interests of authors who want their works to be widely available for the public good. She is Chair of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a Contributing Editor to Communications of the ACM, a computing professionals society. Follow her at @PamuelaSamuelson. She has been a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Toronto Law School as well as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. Publications, courses, and more »

 

Paul SchwartzPaul Schwartz is Jefferson E. Peyser Professor of Law. His scholarship focuses on how the law has sought to regulate and shape information technology. His most frequent areas of publication concern information privacy and data security. At present, Professor Schwartz is engaged in research into comparative privacy developments in the U.S. and the European Union, cloud computing, and the interplay between state and federal privacy law. Follow him at @paulmschwartzPublications, courses, and more »

 

Erik StallmanErik Stallman is the Associate Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic and also an Assistant Clinical Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Before joining the Samuelson Clinic, Erik was a policy counsel at Google, focusing on copyright and telecommunications policy. He spent the previous 12 years in Washington D.C, working for the Federal Communications Commission, the US House of Representatives, the law firm Steptoe & Johnson LLP, and then serving as General Counsel and Director of the Open Internet Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology. His research interests include copyright and machine learning, music licensing, and the intersection of copyright and media regulation. Erik is a graduate of the UC Berkeley School of Law. Publications, courses, and more »

 

Jennifer Urban

Jennifer M. Urban is a Clinical Professor of Law and the Director of Policy Initiatives for the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. Her work considers how the legal, private-ordering, and social systems that govern technology interact with values such as free expression, access to knowledge, freedom to create or innovate, and privacy. With Joe Karaganis, Professor Urban conceived and directs The Takedown Project, a consortium of scholars studying takedown regimes around the world. (www.takedownproject.org). Recent research includes a three-part empirical study, with Karaganis and Brianna L. Schofield, of the DMCA notice-and-takedown system. The studies reveal notice-and-takedown’s importance to copyright holders, online service providers, and the online ecosystem, along with some weaknesses. Professor Urban’s recent paper with Mark Lemley shows that judges with more experience handling patent cases are more likely to rule for defendants. Recent papers with Chris Hoofnagle empirically question longstanding research used to support the dominant “notice and choice” regime in privacy regulations. Publications, courses, and more »

 

Molly Shaffer Van Houweling

Molly Shaffer Van Houweling is the Harold C. Hohbach Distinguished Professor of Patent and IP Law and Associate Dean for J.D. Curriculum and Teaching. Her teaching portfolio includes intellectual property, basic property law, and food law and policy (touching on agricultural innovation and patent policy, among other topics). Much of Professor Van Houweling’s research focuses on copyright law’s implications for new information technologies (and vice versa). She often explores this and other intellectual property issues using theoretical and doctrinal tools borrowed from the law of tangible property. Professor Van Houweling is an Associate Reporter on the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Copyright, and an Adviser to the Restatement of the Law Fourth, Property. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Authors Alliance and Chair of the Board of Creative Commons. Follow her at @mollysvhPublications, courses, and more »

 

Rebecca WexlerRebecca Wexler is an Assistant Professor of Law working on data, technology, and criminal justice. She focuses on evidence law, criminal procedure, privacy and intellectual property protections surrounding new data-driven criminal justice technologies. Before joining Berkeley Law, Professor Wexler clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. She worked as a Yale Public Interest Fellow at The Legal Aid Society’s criminal defense practice and as a Lawyer-inResidence at The Data and Society Research Institute. Follow her at @RebeccaWexler.  Publications, courses, and more »