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.
Education
B.A., Bard College (1972)
J.D., UC Davis (1975)
Elisabeth Anne Semel is teaching the following courses in Fall 2024:
• 285.2D sec. 001 - Death Penalty Clinic Seminar I
• 295.5D sec. 001 - Death Penalty Clinic
Courses During Other Semesters
| Semester | Course Num | Course Title |  Teaching Evaluations | Spring 2025 | 285.3D sec. 001 | Death Penalty Clinic Seminar II | 295.5D sec. 001 | Death Penalty Clinic | Spring 2023 | 285.3D sec. 001 | Death Penalty Clinic Seminar II | View Teaching Evaluation | 295.5D sec. 001 | Death Penalty Clinic | View Teaching Evaluation |
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