Spotlights

Fatima Abbas ’11 was named director of the new Office of Tribal and Native Affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department. As the National Congress of American Indians’ vice president of government relations, she played a key role in obtaining $22 billion of pandemic-related aid for tribal nations and entities. Abbas also worked as the Karuk […]

Professor Christopher Tomlins was awarded the Law & Society Association’s Harry J. Kalven Jr. Prize, which honors empirical scholarship that contributed most effectively to advancing research in the field. Tomlins, a renowned legal historian, joins a long list of faculty from our Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program to win the award, including Frank Zimring, Lauren […]

Berkeley Law’s standing in the entertainment law field was touted recently by Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter. The former included seven alums on its 2023 Best Music Lawyers list while the latter named four alums to its annual Top 100 Entertainment Lawyers list. The Hollywood Reporter also ranked Berkeley as the No. 4 law school for entertainment […]

Berkeley Law Professor Pamela Samuelson recently gave the last of four distinguished campus lectures on the status and future of artificial intelligence, probing whether copyright law should protect AI-produced text and images. A noted copyright expert who called it the only area of current law “that could bring generative AI systems to their knees,” she addressed issues […]

Our popular annual mix of theater and law recently returned to the stage, this time in People v. The Weird Sisters. Actors from UC Irvine’s New Swan Shakespeare Center performed scenes from Macbeth, Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Stanford Law Professor Bernadette Meyler were prosecutor and defense counsel in a trial charging two crimes, […]

Lady Brenda Hale, a judicial pioneer who was the first woman president of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, became Berkeley Law’s latest marquee guest. Before retiring in 2020, she issued landmark rulings in areas such as domestic violence, mental health, divorce, and custody, and broke new gender ground in several positions. You can […]

After asking the U.S. Attorney General to act, our Policy Advocacy Clinic and other advocacy groups celebrated a Department of Justice letter urging states and local courts to reduce criminal legal system fines and fees. Jeffrey Selbin, the clinic’s co-director, says lawmakers, agencies, and courts are “on notice that it’s time to stop trying to […]

Professor Saira Mohamed has been elected vice president of the American Society of International Law, which fosters study in the field as well as international relations based on law and justice. Eight of our students, ASIL fellows through the school’s Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law, joined Mohamed at the organization’s recent annual […]

Jeremy Fogel, executive director of our Berkeley Judicial Institute, will receive the American College of Trial Lawyers’ Samuel E. Gates Litigation Award, given to a lawyer who epitomizes ethical conduct, integrity, collegiality, and professionalism. A former state and federal judge who led the Federal Judicial Center for seven years, Fogel guides the institute’s work promoting […]

The new issue of Transcript, our biannual magazine, has been published. To get a sense of Berkeley Law and its remarkable community, you can read the digital version or a PDF. The main features describe our Death Penalty Clinic’s profound impact on clients and students for over 20 years, and the influence of our exceptional […]