Berkeley Law professors are prolific, insightful scholars with broad and significant influence felt well beyond the school’s walls through their research, legal advocacy, policymaking and commentary.
New Research
Center Hosts Powerhouse Conference
UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Private Law Theory recently hosted the North American Workshop on Private Law Theory for the first time, welcoming a stellar group of scholars from around the world to discuss research works in progress. The workshop’s 11th annual meeting included the revival of its John G. Fleming Award, given to University of Toronto Professor Ernest Weinrib for his tort law contributions.Stellar ESG Scholarship
As part of its annual Berkeley Forum for Corporate Governance, the Berkeley Center for Law and Business hosted an academic symposium focused on ESG — which stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance — topics in business law. In partnership with the European Corporate Governance Institute, the symposium included a Best Paper Award, which includes a $10,000 prize. Three winners were selected from more than 70 articles submitted by scholars from all over the world.Scrutinizing Stipulated Protective Orders
Stipulated protective orders, or SPOs, seal discovery information in a civil lawsuit from the public and have become increasingly common in recent decades. In a new paper in the Duke Law Journal using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, Professor Jonah B. Gelbach and a team of co-authors show that not only are these orders frequently granted, they’re rarely subjected to the type of judicial scrutiny Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(c)trequires — hiding potentially deadly defects and abuse from the public.Highlighting Labor Law Advances
In a new policy brief for the Roosevelt Institute think tank, Professor Diana S. Reddy looks at recent innovations by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which has created policies responsive to economic and institutional realities without the statutory reform many scholars and experts thought would be required to do so.Reforming Rikers
In a new mini-issue of the public affairs magazine Vital City about the ongoing crisis at New York City’s Rikers Island jail, Professor Emeritus Malcolm Feeley and Van Swearingen ’01 analyze the history of efforts to reform prisons and its lessons for today. “From Plantation Prisons to the Modern Era” draws insights from the efforts by judges and special masters to dismantle Southern prisons originally modeled on plantations and mandate changes in California, Feeley and Swearingen propose the jurist handling the Rikers case appoint a receiver to take over.
