By Gwyneth K. Shaw
Rachel Wallace was already teaching in a UC Berkeley Law classroom, as a clinical supervisor at the school’s Policy Advocacy Clinic (PAC), when she had a stark realization: She needed to go back to school.
With a B.A. and B.S. from Notre Dame and a master’s degree from UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, Wallace had considered a range of careers, from her undergraduate emphasis on engineering and philosophy to a pandemic-fueled flirtation with medicine. But during her four years at PAC, the last as interim deputy director — where she impacted state and national policy while collaborating with faculty and law students — the path ahead materialized: She wanted to be a law professor.
Fortunately for Wallace, the perfect-fit Ph.D. was just a walk around the corner, at the law school’s interdisciplinary Jurisprudence & Social Policy (JSP) Program. JSP grew out of the demise of UC Berkeley’s Criminology Department in the 1970s and trains students working on a wide range of social science fields as they intersect with law.
These days — with a Ph.D. increasingly essential to unlocking jobs in legal academia — the program offers a unique opportunity to study with experts in sociology, public health, philosophy, economics, and more.
Wallace had heard about JSP from her clinical colleagues and knew a number of faculty are UC Berkeley Law alums. She conferenced with several while weighing the program against a policy Ph.D. at Goldman, and eventually asked Dean Erwin Chemerinsky what the best path to legal academia would be.
He urged her, if it was manageable, to get both a Ph.D. and a J.D. So Wallace also applied to law school, and will start at Stanford Law in the fall of 2026 after she’s finished her JSP coursework and taken at least one of the three exams needed to advance to candidacy. After law school, she’ll take a break to take the California Bar and potentially do a clerkship, then return to JSP for her remaining exams and dissertation.
An exhilarating journey
So far, Wallace says, her JSP experience has been exceptional, with fellow students and faculty alike encouraging her to explore anything and everything she’s interested in.
“I’m really glad I landed at JSP,” she says. “The interdisciplinary nature of the faculty and the coursework was really a draw for me, and I’m seeing that in practice.”
For example, Wallace says, her current Sociology of Law course taught by Professor Catherine Albiston J.D. ’93 Ph.D. ’01 has provoked fascinating questions as it explores the difference between law and rules and law and norms. She’s getting empirical training, too, and enjoys having the chance to learn different disciplines from scholars with Ph.D.s in those fields — while still grounding everything in the law.
Another perk: JSP students can also take law school classes as electives without falling off their Ph.D. timetable, allowing Wallace to engage on that front ahead of starting her J.D. at Stanford Law.
Already, she’s formulating a research agenda — much of it rooted in her work at PAC and a steady thread of advocacy that runs through her academic and professional endeavors.
Wallace took a criminal justice course at Notre Dame that met inside an Indiana state prison, with incarcerated men and undergraduates learning together. That experience sparked a deep interest in the carceral system, she says, particularly how to make prisons and jails more humane and rehabilitative.
She joined PAC as a master’s student, participating in the clinic’s efforts to eliminate court-ordered fines and fees, particularly in the juvenile system, then was hired to teach and supervise clinic students.
Clinical Professor Jeffrey Selbin, PAC’s faculty director, can’t wait to see what her future holds.
“I’ve had the great privilege of working with Rachel for many years as a student and a colleague, and I now have the joy of watching her flex her intellect as an academic,” he says. “Rachel is a force of nature inside and outside the classroom, and I’m so excited to see how she uses her growing skillset in the service of teaching and scholarship — she’s going to be a world-class professor.”
Wallace hopes to turn some of her work in an independent study this semester with Professor Jonathan Simon J.D. ’87 Ph.D. ’90 into a “mini dissertation prospectus” that will guide her as she moves forward.
“I have this idea that’s percolating around bodily autonomy for people in prisons, and I think that can take a lot of different directions,” she says. “I’m exploring that this semester, where I want to look at labor and work, but also reproductive justice and healthcare in general for people in prisons and jails — and how a lot of times they don’t have a lot of control over their own bodies and their own circumstances while they’re incarcerated. I think I could merge a lot of the current work I’m doing under that umbrella of research, and I think it will evolve as I continue through JSP and law school.”
Making an impact
Wallace’s advocacy work outside of her studies dovetails with her academic interests. She’s currently a policy consultant for One Fair Wage, as part of the California Living Wage for All Coalition.
“It’s an eclectic group of people: union folks, criminal justice advocacy groups, economic justice advocacy groups, and more, and that’s been really impactful for me,” she says. “I like the fact that I can get my coursework in but also do advocacy work at the same time, because it feels like I’m applying what I’m learning and my skill set from Goldman to things that are happening right now.”
In the role, Wallace has helped craft bills in the California State Assembly, and two sponsored by State Rep. Isaac Bryan recently cleared a critical committee. One would raise wages for California’s incarcerated firefighters when they’re actively fighting a fire, while the other would remove the maximum wage cap of $2 per eight-hour shift for incarcerated workers in county jails.
This summer, Wallace will join the California Coalition for Women Prisoners to analyze reproductive healthcare, particularly sterilization, among incarcerated women, and work as a teaching assistant for a Mount Tamalpais College writing course at San Quentin Prison.
She’s also co-authoring a research article focused on tubal ligations in county jails. And if that’s not enough, Wallace is waiting to be matched in the coalition’s Writing Warriors program, which fosters written communication with incarcerated women.
“I’ve just been inspired by a lot of people who have been in the system, and who I feel have been mistreated through the system,” says Wallace, who counts an incarcerated loved one in Minnesota among her mentors. “Sometimes people ask me, ‘You’re doing a lot of things, how do you stay motivated?’ And the answer is that I’m motivated sometimes by rage at the system — but also by people’s stories. There’s this quote that I have on my whiteboard that says, ‘None of us are free until all of us are free.’ And I feel like that really grounds me.”
She calls UC Berkeley Law an ideal place to explore being an advocate as well as an academic. Pursuing both a law degree and a doctorate may mean she has to scale back occasionally, but Wallace says she needs this element to propel her forward.
“I’m busy, but I’m busy doing important things,” she says. “In this moment, it can be really easy to feel hopeless or powerless, and I’ve been talking to a lot of my friends about what we can do to overcome those feelings. And my philosophy has been to just continue doing the work on a day-to-day basis, waking up with some sort of purpose and direction for how I can contribute to alleviating some of the problems that are coming through our current political system and that may come in the future.
“It feels empowering, even if it’s just a very small sliver of the problem that I’m addressing — it does feel motivating when I feel busy or overwhelmed.”