Spotlights

Shneur Wolvovsky ’18 has begun a prestigious fall-semester clerkship with Israeli Supreme Court Justice Menachem Mazuz. A former U.S. District Court judicial intern (Eastern District of New York), Wolvovsky held editor posts at two Berkeley Law journals and won the Prosser Prize in his Written and Oral Advocacy course.

Some 35 local high school students from disadvantaged backgrounds recently completed the Center for Youth Development through Law summer program. They took part in classes and mock trials at Berkeley Law (led by its faculty, students, and alumni) while interning for law offices, public agencies, nonprofits, and elected officials.

Berkeley Law welcomed its Class of 2020 for orientation Aug. 17-18. The 304 students hail from 120 undergraduate schools and 20 countries of birth. This class, 42 percent people of color, includes a taekwondo black belt, a shepherd, a presidential appointee to NASA, a Navy diver, and someone who ran a theater company on Malta.

The first novel by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton ’09 is drawing rave reviews. Set in her native New Orleans, A Kind of Freedom follows three generations of an African-American family, while probing racial disparity in the South. Sexton launched the book August 15 at an open event at Diesel Books in Oakland. 

Steven Druker ’72 has won the 2017 Luxembourg Peace Prize for Outstanding Environmental Peace. Founding executive director of the Alliance for Bio-Integrity, Druker is an internationally renowned advocate for more governmental transparency regarding the risks involved with genetically engineered foods. 

The Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice has launched Be the Change, a podcast hosted by Director Savala Trepczynski ’11. In the latest episode, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky describes growing up in a working-class Chicago neighborhood, his civil rights work, and his constitutional perspective.

Purvi Shah ’06 has received a 2017 Open Society Foundations Soros Equality Fellowship, which supports emerging racial justice leaders. One of seven applicants chosen from over 1,000, Shah co-founded Law4BlackLives, a network of lawyers, law students, and legal workers striving to build the Black Lives Matter movement.

Justice Goodwin Liu, a former Berkeley Law professor, has co-authored a study on the dearth of Asian American judges. Although they comprise 10 percent of graduates in top U.S. law schools, only 3 percent of federal and 2 percent of state judges are Asian American. The study is the first comprehensive look at Asian Americans […]

Jackie Aranda ’15 is savoring victory. The alum helped the Southern Poverty Law Center win a class action suit, which found that Alabama prisoners receive constitutionally inadequate mental-health care. Aranda defended depositions, drafted briefs, examined witnesses, managed nearly 2,000 trial exhibits, and more.

Antonio Ingram ’14 is the first Berkeley Law graduate to receive a Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship, which launched in 2012. Currently clerking for a federal judge in Louisiana, Ingram will spend 10 months in Malawi assisting a high-ranking government official in the nation’s Anti-Corruption Bureau.