Host Faculty Sponsors

2022-2026

Berkeley Law Visiting Scholars Program
Host Faculty Sponsors

Special thanks to all host faculty sponsors for their time, support, and guidance to
all Berkeley Law Visiting Scholars and Visiting Student Researchers.

Kenneth Ayotte
Robert L. Bridges Professor of Law

Professor Ayotte joined Berkeley Law in 2014. From 2007-2014, he was a Professor of Law at Northwestern University. From 2002-2007, he was an Assistant Professor in the Finance and Economics group at Columbia Business School, where he won the Dean’s Award For Teaching Excellence. In 2023, Ayotte received the Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction from Berkeley Law.

Ayotte’s research interests are in the areas of bankruptcy, corporate finance, and law and economics. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, such as Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, as well as law reviews, including University of Chicago Law Review and Michigan Law Review. His paper “Bankruptcy or Bailouts?” with David Skeel, analyzing the role of bankruptcy law in financial crises, was chosen as a Top 10 article in corporate and securities law by the Corporate Practice Commentator.

Ayotte’s research uses financial and economic tools to better understand our bankruptcy system. His work investigates the role of creditor control in Chapter 11 and the use of debtor-in-possession financing to achieve this control. He is also interested in the study of complexity in contracting and how this affects debt contracting and corporate group structure. His working papers can be found on his SSRN page here.

Adam Badawi
Professor of Law

Adam Badawi is a Professor of Law at UC Berkeley. He writes widely on issues of law and finance with an emphasis on corporate governance, corporate transactions, and shareholder litigation. Much of his recent work uses text analysis and machine learning to analyze debt agreements, merger documents, and shareholder class action complaints. At Berkeley Law, he teaches Contracts, Corporations, Mergers and Acquisitions, and seminars related to these topics.

His research includes “Does Voluntary Financial Disclosure Matter? The Case of Fairness Opinions in M&A” (forthcoming, The Journal of Law and Economics) (with Matthew D. Cain and Steven Davidoff Solomon), “How Informative is the Text of Securities Complaints?” (forthcoming, Journal of Law, Economics & Organization), “Social Good and Litigation Risk” (forthcoming, Harvard Business Law Review) (with Frank Partnoy); and “Is There a First-Drafter Advantage in M&A?”, California Law Review (2019) (with Elisabeth de Fontenay) (selected as one of the top 10 corporate and securities articles of 2019 by Corporate Practice Commentator).

Prior to joining the faculty of Berkeley Law in 2017, Badawi was a Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. He has been a Visiting Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and he served as a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. Before joining the academy he was a litigator in the San Francisco office of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP and was a law clerk to the Hon. Michael McConnell of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Andrew C. Baker
Assistant Professor of Law

Andrew Baker is an assistant professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. His primary fields of interest are corporate governance, securities regulation, and the application of empirical methods to legal questions. His work has been published in the Journal of Financial Economics, The Journal of Law, Finance, and Accounting, and the Stanford Law Review. Before joining Berkeley Law, Baker was a Research Fellow with the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University.

For more information, visit Baker’s personal website.

Andrew Bradt
Shannon Cecil Turner Professor of Jurisprudence
Faculty Director, Civil Justice Research Initiative

Andrew Bradt writes and teaches primarily in the areas of civil procedure, conflict of laws, and civil remedies. His current research focuses on the adaptation of procedural and choice-of-law systems to large-scale multijurisdictional litigation, with a particular interest in federal multidistrict litigation. In 2022, he was one of five recipients of the campuswide Distinguished Teaching Award. In 2019, he received Berkeley Law’s Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction. At Berkeley, Bradt is the faculty director of the Civil Justice Research Initiative, a think tank whose mission is to systematically identify and produce highly credible, unbiased research on critical issues concerning the civil justice system, including expanding access to justice

Bradt’s scholarship has been published in numerous law journals and has been cited by both courts and prominent legal treatises. He is a co-author, with Geoffrey C. Hazard, William A. Fletcher, and Stephen McG. Bundy, of Pleading and Procedure—Cases and Materials (12th ed., Foundation Press, 2020), and, with Edward Sherman, Richard Marcus, and Howard Erichson, of Complex Litigation—Cases and Materials on Advanced Civil Procedure (7th ed., West Academic, 2021). In 2019, he was elected to the membership of the American Law Institute, and he serves on the Members Consultative Groups for the Restatement (Third), Conflict of Laws, and the Restatement (Third), Torts: Remedies.

In January 2023, Bradt was appointed by the Chief Justice to a five-year term as Associate Reporter to the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules of the Judicial Conference of the United States. In that position, he analyzes suggested changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, develops proposed drafts of rules for committee consideration, reviews and summarizes public comments on proposed amendments, and generates the committee notes and other materials documenting the committee’s work.

Immediately prior to joining the Berkeley Law faculty, Bradt was a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. Before entering academia, Bradt was a litigator in the Issues & Appeals Group at Jones Day in New York City, and at Ropes & Gray in Boston. He also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Robert A. Katzmann of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Honorable Patti B. Saris of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Bradt graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he received the Joseph H. Beale Prize for Conflict of Laws, and summa cum laude from Harvard College, where he concentrated in Social Studies. He is a member of the state bar of Massachusetts.

Khiara M. Bridges
Professor of Law

Khiara M. Bridges is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. She has written many articles concerning race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, the NYU Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). She is a coeditor of a reproductive justice book series that is published under the imprint of the University of California Press.

She graduated as valedictorian from Spelman College, receiving her degree in three years. She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School and her Ph.D., with distinction, from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology. While in law school, she was a teaching assistant for the former dean, David Leebron (Torts), as well as for the late E. Allan Farnsworth (Contracts). She was a member of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar. She speaks fluent Spanish and basic Arabic, and she is a classically trained ballet dancer.

Richard Buxbaum
Jackson H. Ralston Professor of International Law (Emeritus)

Richard Buxbaum ’53 practiced law in Rochester, New York, and with the U.S. Army before joining the Berkeley Law faculty in 1961. He publishes in the fields of corporation law and comparative and international economic law, from 1987 to 2003 was editor in chief of the American Journal of Comparative Law. Buxbaum founded and was the first chair of UC Berkeley’s Center for German and European Studies and Center for Western European Studies. From 1993 to 1999, he was dean of international and area studies at UC Berkeley.

Buxbaum was one of the five defense counsel in the criminal proceedings against the 773 members of the Free Speech Movement from 1964 to 1967; represented various campus organizations and individuals in cases arising out of Vietnam War protests; and was defense counsel in a large number of criminal proceedings that accompanied the Third World Strike of 1969-70, which was a factor in the development of affirmative action programs for student admissions on the campus. He was the first director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at Berkeley, serving from 1969 to 1974. His involvement with the National Housing Law Project goes back to its formation as a Backup Center for the Legal Services Corporation in 1969.

Buxbaum has served on various state and national committees engaged in the drafting and review of corporate and securities legislation. He is contributing editor to a variety of U.S. and foreign professional journals and has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Michigan, Cologne, Frankfurt, Münster and Sydney. He was appointed Honorary Professor of Law of Peking University, holds honorary degrees from the universities of Cologne, Osnabrück, Eötvös Lorand, McGill, Humboldt and the Bucerius School of Law, and in 1992 received the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Award for Humanities and Arts. Buxbaum is a member of the Council on Foreign Affairs, the American Law Institute and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.

Hanoch Dagan
Elizabeth J. Boalt Professor in Law
Director, Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory 

Hanoch Dagan joined the Berkeley Law faculty in fall 2023 as a Professor of Law and the founding Director of the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory.

Professor Dagan writes and teaches primarily in the areas of private law theory, contracts, property, and legal theory. Among his many publications are over 130 articles in major law reviews and journals, such as Yale Law Journal, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Columbia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, California Law Review, and more. Dagan is the author of eight books, including Property: Values and Institutions (opens in a new tab) (Oxford University Press, 2011), Reconstructing American Legal Realism & Rethinking Private Law Theory (opens in a new tab) (Oxford University Press, 2013), The Choice Theory of Contracts (opens in a new tab) (with Michael A. Heller) (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and A Liberal Theory of Property (opens in a new tab) (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He edited six books, including Properties of Property (opens in a new tab) (Wolters Kluwer, 2012) (with Gregory S. Alexander) and Research Handbook on Private Law Theory (opens in a new tab) (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020) (with Benjamin Zipursky). Dagan’s latest book, Relational Justice: A Theory of Private Law (opens in a new tab) (2024; with Avihay Dorfman) just came out with Oxford University Press.

Before joining the Berkeley faculty, Professor Dagan was the Stewart and Judy Colton Professor of Legal Theory and Innovation and the Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel-Aviv University. Professor Dagan is also a former Dean of TAU’s Faculty of Law and served as the founding Director of the Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies, the Director of The Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law, and the Editor in Chief of Theoretical Inquiries in Law.

Professor Dagan has been a visiting professor at Yale, Columbia, Michigan, Cornell, UCLA, and Toronto. Dagan delivered keynote speeches and endowed lectures at Singapore, Alabama, Toronto, Queensland, Cape Town, Monash (Melbourne), and Oxford. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the International Academy of Comparative Law. 

Dhammika Dharmapala
Professor of Law

Dhammika Dharmapala joined Berkeley Law in 2023 from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was the Paul H. and Theo Leffmann Professor of Commercial Law. He serves as Co-Editor of the Journal of Law and Economics, and is an International Research Fellow of the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, a fellow of the CESifo Research Network, and a research member of the European Corporate Governance Institute. He is also Co-President of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies and a member of the Advisory Board of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. He has previously served on the Boards of the American Law and Economics Association, the National Tax Association, and the International Institute of Public Finance. He has held postdoctoral or visiting positions at various institutions, including Harvard, Michigan, Georgetown, Oxford, the Australian National University, and the International Monetary Fund.

Dharmapala received a PhD in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley; his thesis was awarded the National Tax Association’s Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. His scholarship spans the fields of taxation and public finance, the economic analysis of law, and corporate finance and governance. This research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals in law, economics, and finance, as well as in law reviews (such as the University of Chicago Law Review). His paper on “Estimating Firms’ Responses to Securities Regulation Using a Bunching Approach” was awarded the 2023 Distinguished Article Prize of the American Law and Economics Association. His work has also been cited in various media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, the New Yorker, and The Economist. His papers are available at SSRN and Google Scholar.

Catherine Fisk
Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law

Catherine Fisk teaches Employment Law, Labor Law, Civil Procedure, and Understanding the U.S. Legal Profession.  She is a Faculty Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Work and the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.

Professor Fisk is the author of several books. Her first, Working Knowledge:  Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009, 2014), won prizes from the American Society for Legal History and the American Historical Association.  In her next book, Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue (Harvard University Press, 2016), Fisk explored the law and norms of credit and compensation for writing, contrasting the writer-protective rules negotiated by unionized writers in film and TV with far less protective norms developed in non-union advertising. Fisk is the co-author of four books for use in law school and legal studies classes: Labor Law in the Contemporary Workplace (3d ed. 2019), The Legal Profession: Ethics in Contemporary Practice (2d ed. 2019), What Lawyers Do: Understanding the Many American Legal Practices (2020), and Labor Law Stories (2005). Her next book will examine the professional identities of lawyers who represented activist, multi-racial, and politically progressive unions in the mid-twentieth century.

Fisk’s scholarship has appeared in many leading law reviews. Her recent works explore innovative ways to improve labor standards, labor and social movement lawyering, free speech at and about work, and reforming police labor relations.

Professor Fisk’s current public service and pro bono legal work includes filing amicus briefs on various labor and employment law issues, service on the Advisory Board of the Berkeley Labor Center, the board of directors of the American Society for Legal History and the boards of directors of two Bay Area workers’ rights nonprofits, and occasional service as an arbitrator under collectively bargained labor contracts. Before joining the Berkeley faculty in 2017, she was on the law faculties at UC Irvine, Duke University, the University of Southern California, and Loyola Law School of Los Angeles. Prior to entering academia, Fisk practiced civil appellate litigation and union-side labor law in Washington, D.C., and clerked on the Ninth Circuit. Fisk received an AB summa cum laude from Princeton University and a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was elected to Order of the Coif. 

Jonah B. Gelbach
Herman F. Selvin Professor of Law

Jonah Gelbach’s teaching and scholarship focuses on civil procedure, evidence, statutory interpretation, law and economics, event study methodology, securities litigation, the economics of crime, applied statistical methodology, evaluation of public assistance programs, and general applied microeconomics. He has taught at the J.D., Ph.D., masters, and undergraduate levels and published in top law and economics journals, including the American Economic Review, Stanford Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal.

Gelbach is a former member of the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association and has served on the editorial board for the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. He has been a referee for countless economics journals and many law reviews. He served as an informal pro bono consultant on the design of the juror selection system for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. He also served as an independent consultant to the Administrative Conference of the United States, for which he co-authored a study of disability appeals to the federal district courts.

Gelbach was appointed as the Herman F. Selvin Professor of Law in 2021 after joining the Berkeley faculty in 2019. He previously held tenured appointments in law at Penn Law and in economics at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management and at the University of Maryland at College Park.

Pamela Samuelson
Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor of School Information
Co-Director, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology

Pamela Samuelson is the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She is recognized as a pioneer in digital copyright law, intellectual property, cyberlaw and information policy. Since 1996, she has held a joint appointment at Berkeley Law School and UC Berkeley’s School of Information. Samuelson is a director of the internationally-renowned Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. She is co-founder and chair of the board of Authors Alliance, a nonprofit organization that promotes the public interest in access to knowledge. She also serves on the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as on the advisory boards for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy & Technology, and Public Knowledge.

Samuelson began her legal career as an associate with Willkie Farr & Gallagher in New York. She began her career as a legal academic at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, from which she visited at Columbia, Cornell, and Emory Law Schools. While on the Berkeley faculty, she has been a distinguished visiting professor at University of Toronto Law School as well as a visiting professor at the University of Melbourne and Harvard Law Schools. She was named an honorary professor at the University of Amsterdam in 2002.

Samuelson has written and published extensively in the areas of copyright, software protection and cyberlaw. Her recent publications include: Generative AI Meets Copyright, 381 Science 158 (2023); Discovering the Impact of eBay on Copyright Injunctions Through Empirical Evidence, 64 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1447 (2023) (with Matthew Sag); Withholding Injunctions in Copyright Cases: The Impact of eBay, 63 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. (2022); Interfaces and Interoperability After Google v. Oracle, 100 Texas L. Rev. 1 (2021) (with Mark A. Lemley); The Disgorgement Remedy of Design Patent Law, 108 Calif. L. Rev. 183 (2020) (with Mark P. Gergen); Staking the Boundaries of Software Copyrights in the Shadow of Patents, 71 Fla. L. Rev. (2019); Saving Software’s Fair Use Future, 31 Harv. J. L. & Tech. 535 (2018) (with Clark D. Asay); Strategies for Discerning the Boundaries of Copyrights and Utility Patents, 92 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1493 (2017); Functionality and Expression in Computer Programs, 31 Berkeley Tech. L. J. 1215 (2016); Functional Compilations, 54 Houston L. Rev. 321 (2016); Reconceptualizing Copyright’s Merger Doctrine, 63 J. Cop. Soc’y 417 (2016); Notice Failures Arising From Copyright’s Duration Rules, 96 B. U. L. Rev. 667 (2016); Freedom to Tinker, 17 Theor’l Inquir. L. 563 (2016). 

Other notable publications include: The Google Book Settlement as Copyright Reform, 2011 Wisc. L. Rev. 478; Google Book Search and the Future of Books in Cyberspace, 94 Minn. L. Rev. 1308 (2010); Statutory Damages in U.S. Copyright Law: A Remedy in Need of Reform, 51 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 439 (2009) (with Tara Wheatland); High Technology Entrepreneurs and the Patent System: Results of the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey (with Stuart J.H. Graham, Robert P. Merges, & Ted Sichelman), 24 Berkeley Technology L. J. 1255 (2010); Why Copyright Excludes Systems and Processes From the Scope of Its Protection, 85 Tex. L. Rev. 1921 (2007); Unbundling Fair Uses, 77 Fordham L. Rev. 2537 (2007); Enriching Discourse on Public Domains, 55 Duke L. J. 783 (2006); Intellectual Property Arbitrage: How Foreign Rules Can Affect Domestic Protections, 71 Chi. L. Rev. 223 (2004); The Law and Economics of Reverse Engineering, 111 Yale L. J. 1575 (2002); Privacy as Intellectual Property?, 52 Stan. L. Rev. 1125 (2000); Intellectual Property Rights in Data?, 50 Vand. L. Rev. 51 (1997) (co-authored with J.H. Reichman); A Manifesto Concerning the Legal Protection of Computer Programs, 94 Colum. L. Rev. 2308 (1994) (co-authored with Randall Davis, Mitchell Kapor, and J.H. Reichman); Benson Revisited: The Case Against Patent Protection for Algorithms and Other Computer Program-Related Inventions, 39 Emory L. J. 1025 (1990); and CONTU Revisited: The Case Against Copyright Protection for Computer Programs in Machine-Readable Form, 1984 Duke L. J. 663 (1984).

Since 1990, Samuelson has been a contributing editor of Communications of the ACM, a computing professionals journal respected for its coverage of existing and emerging technologies, for which she has written more than seventy “Legally Speaking” columns. From 1997 through 2002, Samuelson was a fellow of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She is also a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery. The Anita Borg Institute honored Samuelson with its Women of Vision Award for Social Impact in 2005, and the public interest organization Public Knowledge awarded her its IP3 Award for her contributions to Internet law and policy in October 2010.

Elisabeth Semel
Chancellor’s Clinical Professor of Law
Co-Director, Death Penalty Clinic

Elisabeth Semel joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2001 after two decades as a criminal and capital defense attorney and four years as the director of the American Bar Association Death Penalty Representation Project in Washington, D.C., including several years as adjunct faculty Georgetown Law.

Semel was the founding director of the Death Penalty Clinic, which she currently co-directs. In that role, she represents clients facing capital punishment at all stages of the proceedings in California and several states in the South. Semel and her students have filed amicus curiae briefs in death penalty cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, including Miller-El v. Cockrell, Miller-El v. Dretke, Snyder v. Louisiana, and Williams v. California (all dealing with race discrimination in jury selection).

In 2020, Semel and several of her students published Whitewashing the Jury Box: How California Perpetuates the Exclusion of Black and Latinx Jurors, which provided the evidentiary support for the California Legislature’s passage of AB 3070. The new statute dramatically reshapes the exercise of peremptory challenges trials to preclude strikes in which implicit or explicit racial or ethnic bias could be a factor.  In 2024, Semel and another group of students published Guess Who’s Coming to Jury Duty: How the Failure to Collect Juror Demographic Data Contributes to Whitewashing the Jury Box. The new report catalogues the states that gather prospective jurors’ self-identified race and ethnicity and those that do not. It examines what courts do with the information, including whether it is provided to the court and counsel for use during jury selection, and the consequences of these choices in furthering or obstructing jury representativeness and diversity.

Semel maintains a page, Batson Reform State by State, on the Death Penalty Clinic website that tracks reforms in the use of peremptory challenges. Her publications include Batson and the Discriminatory Use of Peremptory Challenges in the 21st Century in Jurywork: Systematic Techniques (Thomson Reuters, 2023-24 ed.) and Reflections on Justice Stevens’s Concurring Opinion in Baze v. Rees: A Fifth Gregg Justice Renounces Capital Punishment, 43 UC Davis L. Rev. 783 (2010). She has written numerous articles about criminal defense practice and testified before Congress and the California Legislature.

Semel is the recipient of the Berkeley Law Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award (2023), an Honorary Doctor of Laws from Bard College (2016), the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice Lifetime Achievement Award (2019), and the Berkeley Law Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction (2015), among other honors.

Daniel Farber
Sho Sato Professor of Law
Faculty Director, Center for Law, Energy, & the Environment

Dan Farber is the Sho Sato Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He also has leadership roles at two Berkeley research centers: the Center for Law, Energy, and Environment; and the Edley Center on Law and Democracy. Professor Farber is a member of the American Academy of Arts.

Professor Farber is a graduate of the University of Illinois, where he earned his B.A., M.A., and J.D. degrees. He graduated, summa cum laude, from the College of Law, where he was the class valedictorian and served as editor-in-chief of the University of Illinois Law Review. After law school, he was a law clerk for Judge Philip W. Tone of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and then for Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court. Professor Farber practiced law with Sidley & Austin, where he primarily worked on energy issues, before returning to the University of Illinois as a faculty member in 1978. He taught at the University of Minnesota Law School faculty from 1981 to 2002, where he was the McKnight Presidential Professor of Public Law. He also has been a visiting professor at the Stanford Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago Law School.

His most recent book is Contested Ground: How to Understand the Limits on Presidential Power (UC Press 2021). His earlier books include Research Handbook on Public Choice and Public Law (Elgar 2010) (with A. O’Connell); Judgment Calls: Politics and Principle in Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press 2008) (with S. Sherry); Retained by the People: The “Silent” Ninth Amendment and the Rights Americans Don’t Know They Have (Basic Books 2007); Lincoln’s Constitution (University of Chicago Press 2003); and Eco-Pragmatism: How to Make Sensible Environmental Decisions in an Uncertain World (University of Chicago Press 1999).

Stavros Gadinis
George R. Johnson Professor of Law
Faculty Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business

Professor Gadinis’ research examines questions in corporate law and financial regulation, both domestic and international. He is particularly interested in the interplay between companies and regulators, exploring the institutional framework for law enforcement, compliance, and risk management. In the last few years, he has focused on sustainability and social issues as an attempt to expand the scope of corporate governance. In Corporate Law and Social Risk (co-authored with Amelia Miazad)(2020 Vanderbilt Law Review), the focus is on stakeholder outreach as a governance system seeking to identify and address social risks for the business. In a follow-up article, A Test of Stakeholder Capitalism (co-authored with Amelia Miazad) they explore how corporations relied on feedback from stakeholders to address the implications of the Covid pandemic. His article The Hidden Power of Compliance (co-authored with Amelia Miazad)(2019 Minnesota Law Review) explores how extensive internal reporting within companies impacts the liability of board members. In Collaborative Gatekeepers (co-authored with Colby Mangels)(2016 Washington & Lee Law Review) he explores anti-money laundering law as a model of pro-active misconduct reporting. Gadinis’ work has also traced the spread of financial standards around the world, showing how private, regulator, or government supports leads to distinct results (Three Pathways to Global Standards, 2015 American Journal of International Law). Gadinis has argued that systemic risk reforms introduced after the 2008 financial crisis has resulted in increasing the role of political appointees over independent regulators in the oversight of the financial system (2012 California Law Review).

Mark Gergen
Robert and Joann Burch D.P. Professor of Tax Law and Policy

Mark Gergen joined the Berkeley faculty in 2008 after teaching at the University of Texas School of Law for over two decades.  His principal teaching interests are in Contracts, Torts, Federal Income Tax, and Partnership Tax.  He has also taught a wide range of other subjects, including, since joining the Berkeley faculty, Property, Remedies, and Taxation of Financial Products and Institutions. From 2016 to 2021, he was Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development.

Gergen’s current scholarly interests include both private law and tax.  His major private law publications since joining the Berkeley faculty include:

•  Negligent Misrepresentation as Contract, forthcoming in California Law Review
•  Causation in Disgorgement, 92 Boston University Law Review 827 (2012)
•  The Supreme Court’s Accidental Revolution? The Test for Permanent Injunctions, 112 Columbia Law Review 203 (2012)(with John M. Golden and Henry E. Smith)
•  A Theory of Self-Help Remedies in Contract, 89 B.U.L. Rev. 1397 (2009)

His major tax publications since joining the Berkeley faculty include:

•  Uncertainty and Tax Enforcement: A Case for Modest Fault-Based Penalties, 64 Tax L. Rev. 453 (2011)
•  A Pragmatic Case for Taxing an Equity Fund Manager’s Profit Share as Compensation, 87 Taxes 139 (March 2009)
•  How Corporate Integration Could Kill the Market for Corporate Tax Shelters, 61 Tax L. Rev. 145 (2008)

Works co-authored with other members of the Berkeley faculty include:

•  Common Law Judicial Decision Making: The Case of the New York Court of Appeals, 60 Buffalo L. Rev. 897 (2012)(with Kevin M. Quinn)
•  Fuller, Eisenberg, and Gergen, Basic Contract Law (9th ed. 2013)(with Melvin Eisenberg)

Gergen’s current scholarly projects include a study of the design and feasibility of a state carbon tax, a project with Kevin Quinn studying patterns of disagreement on the California Supreme Court in the 20th Century, a paper on the use of conflict and distrust as levers for tax compliance, and a paper on the enforceability of contract disclaimers against non-parties.

Gergen graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1982.   He clerked for the Hon. Harrison L. Winter, United States Court of Appeal for the Fourth Circuit (1982-1983), and was an associate at Arnold and Porter (1983-1985).  He has visited at University College London Faculty of Laws and Harvard Law School.

Gergen was Reporter for Restatement Third, Economic Torts and Related Wrongs from 2005 to 2007 and is an Advisor to the Restatement Third, Restitution and Unjust Enrichment.  He is author of the chapter on Partnership Interests in Ferguson, Freeland, and Ascher, Federal Income Taxation of Estates, Trusts, and Beneficiaries (Aspen Law & Business).  He is the American Editor for the Restitution Law Review.

Sharon B. Jacobs
Professor of Law

Sharon Jacobs teaches and writes in the areas of energy law, environmental law, and administrative law. Her work has been published in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Iowa Law Review, William & Mary Law Review, Administrative Law Review, and the Ecology Law Quarterly. 

Before joining Berkeley Law, Professor Jacobs was an Associate Professor of Law and the John H. Schultz Energy and Natural Resources Law Fellow at the University of Colorado. She was also a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. Professor Jacobs began her legal career with the law firm of Covington & Burling LLP in Washington, D.C. where she practiced as a member of the energy and environmental regulatory groups. Prior to attending law school, Professor Jacobs was a professional cellist. She holds a master’s degree from the Juilliard School and a bachelor’s degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music. 

At Berkeley, Professor Jacobs teaches Energy Law and Policy, Administrative Law, and related courses. 

Sonia Katyal
Associate Dean, Faculty Development and Research
Roger J. Traynor Distinguished Professor of Law
Co-Director, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology

Professor Sonia Katyal’s work focuses on the intersection of technology, intellectual property, and civil rights (including antidiscrimination, privacy, and freedom of speech).

Professor Katyal’s current projects focus on artificial intelligence and intellectual property; trademark law, branding and advertising; the intersection between the right to information and human rights; and a variety of projects on the intersection between art law, cultural heritage and new media.  As a member of the university-wide Haas LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster, Professor Katyal also works on matters regarding law, gender and sexuality.

Professor Katyal’s recent publications include Technoheritage, in the California Law Review; Rethinking Private Accountability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, in the UCLA Law Review; The Paradox of Source Code Secrecy, in the Cornell Law Review; Transparenthood in the Michigan Law Review (with Ilona Turner); Trademarks, Artificial Intelligence, and the Role of the Private Sector, also in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal (with Aniket Kesari); The Gender Panopticon in the UCLA Law Review (with Jessica Jung); and From Trade Secrecy to Seclusion in Georgetown Law Journal (with Charles Tait Graves).   She has also previously published shorter pieces with the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Boston Globe’s Ideas section, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Times, Slate, and the National Law Journal, and has also been cited by the Supreme Court.  

Professor Katyal has won several awards for her work, including an honorable mention in the American Association of Law Schools Scholarly Papers Competition, a Yale Cybercrime Award, and is a three-time winner of a Dukeminier Award from the Williams Project at UCLA for her writing on gender and sexuality. Her recent articles, The Paradox of Source Code Secrecy, was selected for inclusion in the Best Intellectual Property articles of 2019; and From Trade Secrecy to Seclusion (with Tait Graves) won the Law, Science and Innovation/Intellectual Property Prize from the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law in 2022.

During the Obama administration, 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.

Alexa Koenig
Research Professor of Law
Co-Faculty Director, Human Rights Center

Alexa Koenig, PhD, JD, is Co-Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center (winner of the 2015 MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions), Director of HRC’s Investigations Program, and an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, where she teaches classes that focus on the intersection of emerging technologies and human rights. She also co-teaches a class on open source investigative reporting at Berkeley Journalism. Alexa co-founded the Human Rights Center Investigations Lab, which trains students and professionals to use social media and other digital open source content to strengthen human rights research, reporting, and accountability. Alexa is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, a member of the Technology Advisory Board for the Innovation Lab at Human Rights First, an advisory board member of Physicians for Human Rights, and a co-founder of the University of California Network on Human Rights Fact-Finding. She previously helped establish and co-chaired  the Technology Advisory Board of the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court; co-chaired the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Law Committee; and was a member of the University of California’s Presidential Working Group on Artificial Intelligence, for which she co-chaired the Human Resources subcommittee. Alexa has been honored with several awards for her work, including the United Nations Association-SF’s Global Human Rights Award, UC Berkeley’s Mark Bingham Award for Excellence, and the Eleanor Swift Award for Public Service. She has also been honored with a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center (2019), with multiple writing residencies at Mesa Refuge, as a Woman Inspiring Change by Harvard’s Women’s Law Association (2020), and as one of “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics” by Women in AI Ethics (2022). She conceived of and directed development of the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations and has conducted trainings on online open source investigations at organizations around the world. Alexa has a BA from UCLA in World Arts and Cultures summa cum laude, a JD from the University of San Francisco with a specialization in cyberlaw and intellectual property magna cum laude, and both an MA and a PhD from UC Berkeley’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program with honors.

Prasad Krishnamurthy
Professor of Law

Prasad Krishnamurthy joined the Berkeley Law Faculty in 2010. Prasad is a graduate of Yale Law School, where he served as Essays Editor on the Yale Law Journal. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago. He has taught at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR) in Hyderabad, India as a Yale Law School Reubhausen Fellow. Prior to law school, Prasad was a social worker at Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and taught mathematics at Dominguez High School in Compton, CA.

Prasad’s research and teaching interests include financial regulation, antitrust and competition policy, law and economic development, and distributive justice. Prasad’s research seeks to empirically analyze legal rules and institutions and to develop the normative implications of empirical research for law and policy. His publications can be found on his personal webpage.

Christopher Kutz
C. William Maxeiner Distinguished Professor of Law

Christopher Kutz joined the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley Law in 1998. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, he clerked for Judge Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.  Since his appointment at Berkeley, he has been a Visiting Professor at Columbia and Stanford law schools, as well as at Sciences Po University in Paris, France.

Kutz’s work focuses on moral, political and legal philosophy, and he has particular interest in the foundations of criminal, international and constitutional law. His book, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age, (Cambridge University Press, 2000), addressed the question of individual moral and legal responsibility for harms brought about through collective and corporate activity. His 2016 book, On War and Democracy (Princeton University Press), addresses the collision between democratic values and the ethics and laws of war; it addresses both questions of when democratic states can engage in war, such as for purposes of humanitarian intervention, and what limits democratic commitments place on their means, such as torture and drone strikes.  In addition, he has written on issues of the metaphysics of criminal responsibility, social welfare obligations, national responsibilities to mitigate climate change, humanitarian ethics, and political legitimacy. He teaches courses in criminal law, and moral, political and legal philosophy.

Kutz’s publications include “The Collective Work of Citizenship” in Legal Theory (2002); “Justice in Reparations: The Cost of Memory and the Value of Talk” in Philosophy & Public Affairs (2004); “The Difference Uniforms Make: Collective Violence in Criminal Law and the Law of War.”Philosophy & Public Affairs (2005); “The Lawyers Know Sin: Complicity in Torture,” ed. Karen J. Greenberg, The Torture Debate in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); “Secret Law and the Value of Publicity,” Ratio Juris 22: 197-217 (2009); “Democracy, Defense and the Threat of Intervention.” In Justifying National Defense, eds. Cécile Fabre and Seth Lazar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). “How norms die,” Ethics and International Affairs (2014).

Laurent Mayali
Distinguished Lloyd M. Robbins Professor of Law
Faculty Director, Comparative Legal Studies Program
Faculty Director, Robbins Religious and Civil Law Collection

After attending the University of Montpellier (France), Laurent Mayali served as a tenured research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, Germany, and at France’s Center for National Research. He joined the faculty of Berkeley’s rhetoric department in 1985 before permanently joining the Berkeley Law faculty in 1988.

In 1997 he was elected to a chair in Roman Christianity and sources of modern law at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, at the Sorbonne in Paris. He has been a visiting law professor at several universities and has lectured extensively throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia in the areas of legal history and comparative law.

Mayali is the author and coauthor of many publications, including Droit savant et coutumes; L’exclusion des filles dotees (XIIeme-XVeme siecles); Of Strangers Foreigners; and Identite et droit de l’autre; Mourir pour la Patrie et autres textes. E. Kantorowicz, Presentation et traduction avec P. Legendre et Anton Schutz; Repertorium Veterum Codicis Justiniani (with G. Dolezalek); Subjektivierung des justiziellen Beweisverfahrens (with D. Simon); Europaische und amerikanische Richterbilder, Rechtpreschung. Materialen und Studien (with D. Simon); “Symposium on Ancient Law, Economics & Society,” (with J. Lindgren and G. Miller) in the Chicago Kent Law Review; Error Judicis. Juristische Wahrheit und justizieller Irrtum (with D. Simon); Rare Law Books and the Language of Catalogues, Universita degli Studi di Siena (with M. Ascheri). He has also published numerous articles on medieval jurisprudence, customary law, and comparative law.

In 2025, Mohamed was awarded Berkeley Law’s Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction. Mohamed served as a Vice President of the American Society of International Law from 2023 to 2025, and she is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and an appointed expert for the Moscow Mechanism of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Mohamed previously served as Senior Advisor in the Office of the U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan and as an Attorney-Adviser for human rights and refugees in the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser. Immediately prior to joining Berkeley Law, she was the James Milligan Fellow at Columbia Law School. Mohamed is a graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was Executive Articles Editor of the Columbia Law Review and recipient of the David Berger Memorial Prize for international law. She also received a Master of International Affairs from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. She holds an undergraduate degree from Yale University in history and international affairs. She clerked for Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Claudia Polsky is a clinical professor of law and the founding Director of the Environmental Law Clinic.

Before launching the Clinic, she spent eighteen years as a public sector and public interest environmental litigator: fourteen as a Deputy Attorney General in the Environment Section of the California Department of Justice, and four at Earthjustice and Public Citizen Litigation Group. She has litigated cases in trial and appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court; testified before Congress and the California legislature; and drafted and successfully defended environmental regulations.

Polsky also served as Deputy Director for Pollution Prevention and Green Technology at California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control. There, she managed a program that addressed an area of ongoing professional focus: reducing exposure to toxic chemicals throughout the supply chain, from workers to consumers to communities impacted by toxic waste. The Environmental Law Clinic handles many toxics-reduction matters, ranging from pesticide exposure cases to the regulation of hazardous ingredients in consumer products. It also addresses other issues of environmental health and environmental justice, including climate justice and access to safe drinking water for all.

Polsky’s past environmental advocacy work has encompassed negotiating conservation easements for The Nature Conservancy; protecting threatened Pacific salmon populations through dam removal; obtaining an injunction to save 50 million national forest acres from logging and roadbuilding; and serving as a volunteer park ranger in Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks.

Steven Davidoff Solomon
Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of Law

Professor Solomon is one of the nation’s most well known authorities on corporate law. His research focuses on the intersection of law and finance with a particular focus on corporate law and governance, mergers and acquisitions, disclosure practices and procedures and capital markets. He is the author of one of the leading casebooks on mergers and acquisitions., Of the 400+ articles that are published each year by scholars in the field, seven of his law review articles have been selected as being among the “top ten” articles published in corporate and securities law in their respective years. He has also published in leading peer-reviewed finance and economic journals, such as the Journal of Financial Economics and the American Law & Economics Review.  According to the Sisk Report, he is among the top ten cited corporate and securities law professors, among both law professors and law professors at Berkeley. 

Rachel Stern
Professor of Law and Political Science

Rachel E. Stern is a Professor of Law and Political Science and currently holds the Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies. Her research looks at law in Mainland China and Hong Kong, especially the relationship between legal institution building, political space, and professionalization. Stern is the author of Environmental Litigation in China: A Study in Political Ambivalence (Cambridge University Press 2013), as well as numerous articles on legal mobilization and lawyers in contemporary China.