Fresh Faces

Berkeley Law’s outstanding faculty has an infusion of fresh new talent: Six full-time professors whose expertise covers a wide spectrum.

“Maintaining and enhancing our excellence requires continuing to recruit truly top faculty,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says. “We had an extraordinary year in hiring.”

The new crop — two senior scholars, three junior faculty, and a clinical professor — study a broad range of topics. But all say they’re delighted to put down roots at the law school, which has made 28 faculty hires since 2017.

Baker, who holds a Ph.D. and J.D. from Stanford, joins a top-ranked and already exceptional business and corporate law group. He’s excited to work with faculty members who have been friends and mentors for years.

“There’s not a better place to study corporate law right now than at Berkeley,” he says. “What’s uniquely great for me is that Berkeley is filled with scholars who have expertise both in substantive law and institutional details, as well as empirical methodology and the application of economic principles to the law. I won’t have to walk far to find someone who can help me with any research question I’ll have.”

Campos-Bui’s appointment is the latest in a long line of accomplishments. She worked for the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC) and the Policy Advocacy Clinic (PAC) in law school, then was a Berkeley Law Public Interest Fellow at EBCLC right after graduating.

She worked her way up from teaching fellow to supervising attorney to deputy director of PAC, and now to clinical professor. This year, she won a UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Teaching for her extensive work on the harmful effects of juvenile and criminal legal system fees and fines, a cornerstone of PAC’s work in recent years.

“I didn’t know any lawyers growing up and law school felt foreign and overwhelming at times,” Campos-Bui says. “So the fact that someone like me can become an assistant professor gives me a lot of hope for the future of legal education.”

Dagan, who will start in July 2023, says Berkeley Law’s faculty is “inspiring and generative” and that the school’s students — and its dedication to the public interest — are an equally strong draw.

“I’m thrilled to be joining a community of scholars and students working at the cutting edge of academic debate and social justice change,” he says. “The school is positioned at the crossroads of the most interesting and important conversations in law today.”

Dagan, who has taught at Tel Aviv University for almost three decades, focuses on private law theory: analysis of the legal arenas that most profoundly affect our social and economic life, including property, contracts, and torts.

Hausman, who earned his J.D. and Ph.D. at Stanford, calls himself “a recovering political scientist.”

“But one thing I’m trying not to recover from is the habit of thinking hard about cause and effect,” he says. “Lots of the questions that courts want answers to are actually empirical questions, and the statistical methods that I learned in my political science Ph.D. program sometimes point the way to answers — or at least to more questions.”

Teaching Civil Procedure this fall, Hausman spent three years working with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Immigrants’ Rights Project as a Skadden Fellow, and his scholarly agenda reflects that work. He says he’s most interested in who gets deported from the United States, and why — from both a legal and practical perspective.

“Berkeley Law embodies the best of this place,” says Jacobs, a Berkeley native whose work examines the intersection of energy, environmental, and administrative law. “The students are unafraid to pursue change in the law and in the world more broadly. Our faculty are supportive and collegial while producing cuttingedge scholarship. And of course, there’s no better place to work on the energy transition than California, which leads the nation in innovative policy.”

Jacobs, who comes to Berkeley after eight years at the University of Colorado Law School, will work closely with the school’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, a leader in combating climate change. She focuses on the role law and regulatory policy play in navigating “one of the greatest upheavals in energy production and use that the world has ever seen,” and the nature of the legal institutions that make and implement energy policy.

Zhang, who like Hausman also has a J.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford, is a former voting rights attorney whose scholarly focus is racial justice and voting. She too won a prestigious Skadden Fellowship, and worked with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.

“Our democracy is dealing with so many ongoing problems and facing so many imminent threats, and my research is motivated by that reality,” she says. “In particular, minority voting rights and access to the ballot box are two issues that scholars in my field have long struggled with — and that have gotten more urgent in recent years.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw