Berkeley Law Conversations: Implications of the Presidential Election for Various Aspects of Law

The Participants

Khiara M. Bridges

Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School 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 or will soon appear in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the California 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. Read more. 

Erwin Chemerinsky

Dean, UC Berkeley School of Law | Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law

Erwin Chemerinsky became the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law on July 1, 2017, when he joined the faculty as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law. Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law, with a joint appointment in Political Science.  Before that he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2008, and from 1983-2004 was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, including as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. He also has taught at DePaul College of Law and UCLA Law School. He is the author of eleven books—including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction—and the author of more than 200 law review articles. Read more. 

Dan 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 is also the Faculty Director of the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment. Professor Farber serves on the editorial board of Foundation Press. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Life Member of the American Law Institute. He is the editor of Issues in Legal Scholarship.

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 graduation from law school, he was a law clerk for Judge Philip W. Tone of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and then for Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court of the United States. Professor Farber practiced law with Sidley & Austin, where he primarily worked on energy issues, before joining the University of Illinois College of Law faculty in 1978. He was a member of the University of Minnesota Law School faculty from1981 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. Read more.

Jonathan S. Gould

Assistant Professor of Law

Jonathan Gould is an Assistant Professor at Berkeley Law School. His work focuses on the relationship between politics and public law, with special attention to Congress the legislative process. In exploring these topics, he draws on a variety of methods and literatures, including from political theory, public law, and political science. 

Recent scholarship and work in progress includes:

• Law Within Congress, 129 Yale L.J. 1946 (2020)
• The Law of Legislative Representation, 107 Va. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2021)
• Codifying Constitutional Norms, 105 Geo. L.J. (forthcoming 2021)

Gould’s article “Law Within Congress” won the Association of American Law Schools’ 2020 Scholarly Papers Prize, for work by a faculty member in their first five years of law teaching. His public writing has appeared in The Atlantic and Slate. Read more.

Bertrall Ross

Chancellor’s Professor of Law

Bertrall Ross’s research interests are driven by a normative concern about democratic responsiveness and a methodological approach that integrates political theory and empirical social science into discussions of legal doctrine, the institutional role of courts, and democratic design. In the area of legislation, his current research seeks to address how courts should reconcile legislative supremacy with the vexing problem of interpreting statutes in contexts not foreseen by the enacting legislature. In election law, he is examining the constitutional dimensions and the structural sources of the marginalization of the poor in the American political process.

Prior to joining the Berkeley Law community, Bertrall was a Kellis Parker Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School. He clerked for the Honorable Dorothy Nelson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Honorable Myron Thompson of the Middle District of Alabama. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School and has an M.Sc in the Politics of the World Economy from the London School of Economics, a Masters in Public Affairs from Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and a B.A. in International Affairs and History from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Bertrall teaches Legislation, Election Law, and Constitutional Law.

Andrea Roth

Professor of Law

Andrea Roth joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2011, after 3 years as a Grey Fellow at Stanford and 9 years as a trial and appellate public defender in Washington, D.C. Her research focuses on the ways in which pedigreed concepts of criminal procedure and evidentiary law must be retheorized in an era of science-based prosecutions. Her articles include “‘Spit and Acquit’: Prosecutors as Surveillance Entrepreneurs,” 107 Cal. L. Rev. — (forthcoming 2019); “Machine Testimony,” 126 Yale L.J. 1972 (2017); “Trial by Machine,” 104 Georgetown L.J. 1245 (2016); “The Uneasy Case for Marijuana as Chemical Impairment Under a Science-Based Jurisprudence of Dangerousness,” 103 Cal. L. Rev. 841 (2015); “Defying DNA: Rethinking the Role of the Jury in an Age of Scientific Proof of Innocence,” 93 Boston U. L. Rev. 1643 (2013); “Maryland v. King and the Wonderful, Horrible DNA Revolution in Law Enforcement,” 11 Ohio St. L. J. 295 (2013); and “Safety in Numbers?: Deciding When DNA Alone Is Enough To Convict,” 85 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1130 (2010). She is a member of the Legal Resource Committee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Organization of Scientific Area Committees.

In 2019 Roth was one of four recipients of the campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award. In 2017, she received the campus-wide Prytanean Faculty Award given to one pretenure woman faculty member. In 2016, she received the law school’s Rutter Award for Teaching Excellence. She has also received teaching awards from Women of Berkeley Law and the Berkeley Criminal Law Journal. Read more.

Leti Volpp

Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice

Leti Volpp joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2005. She researches immigration and citizenship law with a particular focus on how law is shaped by ideas about culture and identity.  

Her most recent publications include “Protecting the Nation from ‘Honor Killings’: the Construction of a Problem” in Constitutional Commentary (2019), “Refugees Welcome?” in Berkeley La Raza Law Journal (2018), “Passports in the Time of Trump” in Symploke (2018), “Feminist, Sexual, and Queer Citizenship” in the Oxford Handbook of Citizenship (2017),  “Immigrants Outside the Law: President Obama, Discretionary Executive Power, and Regime Change” in Critical Analysis of Law (2016), “The Indigenous As Alien” in the UC Irvine Law Review (2015), “Saving Muslim Women” in Public Books (2015), “Civility and the Undocumented Alien” in Civility, Legality, and Justice in America (Austin Sarat, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2014), “The Boston Bombers” in Fordham Law Review (2014), “Imaginings of Space in Immigration Law” in Law, Culture and the Humanities (2012), the edited symposium issue “Denaturalizing Citizenship: A Symposium on Linda Bosniak’s The Citizen and the Alien and Ayelet Shachar’s The Birthright Lottery” in Issues in Legal Scholarship (2011), and “Framing Cultural Difference: Immigrant Women and Discourses of Tradition” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (2011). She is the editor of Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between (with Marianne Constable and Bryan Wagner) (Fordham University Press, 2019) and Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (with Mary Dudziak) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). She is also the author of “The Culture of Citizenship” in Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2007), “The Citizen and the Terrorist” in UCLA Law Review (2002), “Feminism versus Multiculturalism” in the Columbia Law Review (2001), and many other articles. Read more.