Spotlights

On March 4, the Berkeley Law Conversations series addressing race and the law continued with a panel on race and the legal profession. Moderated by Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, the event featured California Supreme Court Associate Justice and former Berkeley Law Professor Goodwin Liu (pictured) and three other experts from academia and the public sector. You […]

Professor john a. powell probes the legacy of the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation as constitutional in 1896 under the separate but equal doctrine, in a new Russell Sage Foundation Journal of Social Sciences issue on Plessy. powell co-edited the issue, and wrote an article for it exploring the structural racism in America’s legal system and efforts […]

A new book by alumna Heather McGhee ’09, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, is creating major buzz. Blending interviews, personal stories, and empirical research, McGhee shows the toll of believing one group must advance at others’ expense. She’s been interviewed on “The Daily Show with Trevor […]

Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center met an unprecedented year with unrelenting energy. The center’s new annual report describes its far-reaching, wide-ranging work on human trafficking in the Bay Area, police practices across the U.S., the use of chemical weapons in Syria, child marriage in refugee settings, and other projects. You can read the report here.

Professors Steven Davidoff Solomon, Frank Partnoy, and Robert Bartlett were among six Berkeley Center for Law and Business experts who recently explored the financial market controversy around GameStop, Robinhood, and short-selling. In a special Berkeley Boosts event you can see here, they discussed government regulation and interventions and assessed the saga’s broader implications.

The International Human Rights Law Clinic filed testimony from three former Department of Homeland Security officials who point to a cover-up in a major case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Filed for the family of a man beaten by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, leading to his death, the brief says the […]

A film on the pivotal life of Pauli Murray LL.M. ’45, by the Oscar-nominated filmmakers of “RBG,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival Jan. 31. “My Name Is Pauli Murray” shows how Murray, orphaned at age 3 and non-binary, was a key influence on leading jurists, California’s first Black deputy attorney general, and the Episcopal […]

A new documentary on the late Harry Pregerson ’50 was released Jan. 26 on Vimeo and Amazon. “9th Circuit Cowboy,” by two-time Academy Award winner Terry Sanders, tells the inspiring story of Pregerson, who was wounded as a Marine in World War II and later became a longtime U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judge […]

Four members of our Human Rights Center, including Executive Director Alexa Koenig ’13, will teach an 8-week course on methods of open source investigations. The first formal School of Journalism-HRC collaboration, the class will focus on developing a long-form investigative story about improprieties in microfinance and their impact on poor people around the world.   […]

Fernando Aenlle-Rocha ’86 was confirmed as a U.S. District Court judge (Central District of California). A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge since 2017, Aenlle-Rocha spent 12 years as a partner at White & Case focusing on white-collar criminal defense and business litigation. He was also a federal and state prosecutor and president of the […]