Spotlights

A scathing report by the New Orleans Inspector General and a new lawsuit against the city’s judges rely heavily on a California Law Review article by Micah West ’13. Both assert that the New Orleans court system unfairly funds most of its operation—and creates conflicts of interest—by imposing fees on convicted defendants. West’s article detailed […]

Before a packed audience, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer gave the keynote address at Berkeley Law’s Jorde Symposium Sept. 24. When interpreting U.S. law, Breyer said American judges must take greater account of foreign events, law, and practices—the subject of his new book, The Court and the World. Breyer’s brother, Judge Charles Breyer ’66, […]

The National Science Foundation has awarded Catherine Albiston, Victoria Plaut, and two colleagues $1.5 million for their study on the hiring of STEM faculty at research-intensive universities. They will analyze the conditions, processes, and social contexts that generate—or mitigate—gender and racial disparities in faculty hiring at 10 UC schools. The study’s dataset will test theories […]

She’s better known on campus as Berkeley Law’s associate dean of J.D. curriculum and teaching, but Professor Molly Van Houweling is also a champion cyclist. Van Houweling broke a women’s world cycling record September 12, riding 46.273 kilometers in one hour on a track in Mexico. She beat the previous record of 46.065 kilometers, set […]

Anne Joseph O’Connell has won the American Bar Association Administrative Law Section Annual Scholarship Award for “Bureaucracy at the Boundary,” chosen as the best administrative law paper published last year. O’Connell is the fourth repeat winner of the award, having also received it in 2010. Other repeat winners are Cass Sunstein, who served in the […]

Berkeley Law’s Green-Collar Communities Clinic (GC3) played a key role in pushing through AB 816, a new California bill that helps facilitate the creation of worker-run businesses. The law removes barriers to creating new cooperatives that are owned and operated by their employees. It caps a two-year effort by GC3, the nation’s only legal clinic […]

A national television audience will see Sean Darling-Hammond ’14 compete in the finals of “American Ninja Warrior” Aug. 31 on NBC. Darling-Hammond, a clerk for Maryland federal judge Charles Day, will be among 100 participants trying to navigate obstacle courses of increasing difficulty. If he wins, Darling-Hammond has pledged to donate the entire $1 million […]

Disability Rights Advocates recently named Mary-Lee Smith ’05 co-director of litigation. A two-time California Lawyer Magazine “Attorney of the Year,” Smith has worked at the national nonprofit for 10 years. In 2011, she achieved a landmark $1.1 billion settlement requiring Caltrans to provide access to its sidewalks throughout California. In 2013, she helped establish legal […]

Jawwad Khawaja (LL.M. ’75) has been appointed Chief Justice of Pakistan. A Supreme Court justice since 2009, Khawaja spent eight years on Pakistan’s Lahore High Court before resigning in protest—the first judge to do so—during the country’s 2007 constitutional crisis. He then led the Law and Policy Department at Lahore University of Management Science. Khawaja […]

Assistant Professor Andrea Roth lauds President Obama for recently commuting the prison sentences of 46 nonviolent drug offenders, but she says reformers should also pay close attention to the increase in violent crime prosecutions and their racial disparities. Roth’s recent Los Angeles Times op-ed shows how prosecuting violent crimes, not drug possession and sales, has […]