In Brief
A Transformative Award
The distribution stems from class actions filed after 2015’s “dieselgate” exposed how Volkswagen installed illegal “defeat devices” in roughly 11 million vehicles to cheat emissions tests. The company and three of its subsidiaries reached a settlement in May, capping one of the costliest corporate scandals in history.
The devices enabled Volkswagen’s cars — certified as conforming to European Union and U.S. pollution standards — to emit up to 40 times the legally allowed amount of nitrogen dioxide, which has been linked to respiratory diseases and premature death.
Environmental Law Clinic Director Claudia Polsky ’96 and former Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) Director Jordan Diamond ’08 submitted a joint proposal to plaintiff-side firm Lieff Cabraser for a distribution from the cy pres fund generated in one of the class actions. In May, a U.S. district court approved the proposal in full.
“This will be a tremendous boost for our work,” says Professor Daniel Farber, CLEE’s faculty director. “There’s a $1 million project to expand electric vehicle access to the disadvantaged, which will address a major equity issue. It will also serve as a model for building issues of social justice into our work.”
The funds will help initiate other new projects and strengthen existing ones, build staffing in areas that serve racial justice, and bolster administrative support for the school’s overall environmental law program. Also, $500,000 will help support community-based organizations that collaborate with the clinic and center or retain the clinic to assist with costly litigation involving expert witnesses, depositions, and travel.
Some funded areas are tightly linked to the class actions’ subject matter, namely projects aimed at reducing vehicular emissions of conventional pollutants and greenhouse gases.
“Around this nucleus, we built otherwise difficult-to-fund proposal elements with a more attenuated connection to the litigation that are designed to increase capacity … and to share the wealth with our community-based partners,” Polsky says. — Andrew Cohen
Book of the Year
Presumed Guilty argues that the Supreme Court’s rulings over the last half-century have enabled racist policing and sanctioned law enforcement excesses. The book presents a groundbreaking history of judicial failure fueled by an elaborate body of doctrines that allow the police and the courts to believe that people — especially people of color — are guilty before being charged.
America’s most-cited constitutional law scholar, Chemerinsky has litigated cases dealing with police misconduct for decades. Examining seminal Supreme Court cases and justices, he demonstrates how the Court has repeatedly declined to impose constitutional checks on police while deliberately gutting remedies to challenge police misconduct.
International Alliance
“This will ultimately assist the soonest recovery of our economy,” says mergers and acquisitions lawyer Vitalii Mainarovych. “The course contributes to the overall understanding of how corporate finance works in a very user-friendly way, and such corporate finance will increase the flow of capital and foreign investments into Ukraine.”
Providing an online certificate program and knowledge platform for lawyers and other non-financial professionals, the Executive Education course normally costs $1,000. Delivered through online lectures and interviews, it conveys how to apply financial information analysis and corporate valuation in business settings and throughout legal practice. There are roughly 20 hours of content and a 10-week recommended schedule, but participants have up to a year to complete the requirements and earn the certificate.
Berkeley Law Professor Robert Bartlett heard from a colleague that some Ukrainian lawyers had asked about online options while their country and careers were suffering from the Russian invasion. He brought the idea to Berkeley Law Assistant Dean for Executive Education and Revenue Generation Adam Sterling ’13, who then connected with Oleksandr Akymenko at Ukrainian Global University and Artem Shaipov, a lawyer and development professional with close ties to the Ukrainian Bar Association.
“As a public university, access to education is a key priority,” Sterling says. “The work of these 100 Ukrainian attorneys has been disrupted by the war. This is a small gesture, but one we’re grateful to be able to make.”
Course participant Oleksandr Lysenko, who works as a corporate governance consultant, says, “Ukraine’s fight is also for the civilized world. In this regard, worldwide consolidation and international partnerships like this are absolutely crucial.” — Andrew Cohen
Sensational Summers
Yuhan Wu ’24 externed with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California’s Patent Program. She is active with the school’s Women in Tech Law group (co-president), Berkeley Technology Law Journal (articles editor), Berkeley Business Law Journal (senior publishing editor), and Food Justice Project (co-director of client services).
“I gained substantial understanding of the patent system and what litigation work is like, which helps me narrow down the practice areas I want to pursue,” Wu says.
George Abunaw ’24 worked as an associate doing sports immigration work at Maiorova Law. A former Boston University soccer team captain, he works with UC Berkeley’s Graduate Assembly (law school representative), the Berkeley Journal of Entertainment and Sports Law (social media editor), and Law Students of African Descent (public relations chair).
“As a lover of sports and a former collegiate athlete who is now a law student, it has been incredible to experience sports from a legal perspective,” Abunaw says.
Billy Bradley ’24 worked with Legal Services Alabama as a Rural Summer Legal Corps intern. A first-generation professional student, he holds leadership positions at five Berkeley Law organizations or journals.
“I’ve been able to research several substantive topics across the civil law sphere,” says Bradley, who grew up near the Florida-Alabama border. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to help others in the same difficult situations I saw growing up.”
Paloma Palmer ’24 was a legal intern at the United Nations International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague, Netherlands. A former U.S. Department of Defense Boren Scholar, she is the Berkeley Journal of International Law’s associate editor and a research assistant to Professor David Oppenheimer.
“My assignments were phenomenal opportunities to learn more about the Yugoslav conflict, international criminal justice, and how to ‘think like a prosecutor,’” Palmer says. — Andrew Cohen
Combating Cyber War Crimes
The submission focused on attacks against Ukraine’s power grid in 2015 and 2016 — which caused blackouts that impacted hundreds of thousands of people — and took place in the context of fighting in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine since 2014. Since then, the center has continued to document and investigate hostilities in the cyber domain between Russia and Ukraine.
The center seeks to broaden the court’s investigation “to include the cyber domain in addition to traditional domains of warfare — land, air, maritime, and space — given the Russian Federation’s history of hostile cyber activities in Ukraine.” It asserts that an ICC investigation into cyber war crimes would not only deter states from targeting civilian critical infrastructure, but could set important legal precedent for the application of international law in cyberspace.
The submission further notes that “State-sponsored cyber attacks have escalated in the shadows,” with no mechanisms for accountability. — Andrew Cohen
Fortifying the Scholarly Community
Now Deer This
We posted the photo on Instagram, held a caption contest, selected four entries for people to choose from, and now the buck stops here. The winning caption — with an impressive 40% of the vote — came from 3L Colton Walker: “Voir Deer.”
The other witty finalists: “Berkeley Law Is Where to Go for the Bucks”, “What? Like It’s Hard?”, and “SCOTUS Term in Review: What the Buck.”
Thanks to Felix for capturing the moment, to everyone who voted, and to our deer friend for providing a great photo-op.
In the SCOTUS Fab Four
The program enables mid-career professionals, recent law school graduates, and doctoral degree holders from law and political science fields to broaden their understanding of the judicial system through exposure to federal court administration. Ku is assigned to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, the judicial branch’s main support entity.
Beyond their primary responsibilities, fellows learn about upcoming cases at a Supreme Court preview conference, get gallery seating at oral argument and non-argument sessions, and attend luncheon seminars featuring high-level speakers, meetings with jurists and senior judicial administrators, and Supreme Court Historical Society events.
Fellows produce a work of scholarship on a topic relevant to their agency placement. They present their partial draft at a winter research workshop at the Supreme Court, and later present their paper to a group of federal judges.
Co-president of her 3L class and La Alianza Law Students Association, Ku received the school’s Francine Diaz Memorial Award for her commitment to social justice for women of color. Co-chair of the San Francisco Bay Area’s Minority Bar Coalition, she is also an accomplished photographer who had an exhibit at Berkeley Law (the Womxn of Color Collective Portrait Project) and co-authored a narrative cookbook called Flavors of Oakland. — Andrew Cohen
Tech Help for Defendants
“Overworked public defenders are asked to evaluate the credibility of evidence beyond their legal expertise,” Yeo says. “We provide them with more than generalized training in DNA or cell phone evidence. We match them with actual people who can help answer specific questions which are critical to their legal strategy. We help attorneys understand what the evidence presented against their client says, and — perhaps more importantly — what that evidence does not say.”
PDQuery’s current slate of volunteers includes medical students, computer scientists, and software engineers scattered across Silicon Valley. These volunteers review medical records, conduct statistical analyses, and provide academic citations to lawyers in need of technical support.
The organization is supported by two Berkeley Law professors: Andrea Roth, who sits on the board of directors, and Rebecca Wexler, who serves as an advisor.
For her day job, Yeo works as a corporate associate in Cooley’s San Francisco office. She can be contacted at dana@pdquery.org. — Andrew Cohen
Much to Celebrate
Dean Erwin Chemerinsky will give remarks, and the clinic will herald some of its foundational donors. The next day, there will be a picnic in Tilden Regional Park for clinic alums and their families.
Our next Transcript issue will highlight the celebration, explore the clinic’s major impact within Berkeley Law and nationally, and profile some of its former students who are now engaged in pathbreaking work.
Through individual representation and impact litigation, clinic faculty and students have advocated on behalf of death-sentenced clients in 10 states. A companion seminar engages students in substantive capital punishment law, investigation skills, and death penalty litigation fundamentals.
The clinic has filed several amicus curiae briefs in both U.S. and California Supreme Court cases involving challenges to discriminatory jury selection, race discrimination in the administration of the death penalty, and execution methods.
It also recently produced reports on racial bias in the exercise of peremptory challenges in jury selection in California (helping to propel legislative reform) and Kansas.
Full Steam Ahead
The surging program — which currently houses six in-house and eight community-based clinics — plans to add three more in-house clinics and four professors over the next five years.
“Clinics used to be something law students would discover,” Altholz says. “Now, they’re the reason why many students come to law school. There’s no better place to learn lawyering skills.”
Alper, who joined Berkeley Law with Altholz in 2005, sees clinics especially appealing to students in today’s political climate.
“They’re questioning whether the institutions they believed in can actually work to protect democracy and justice,” he says. “We offer an opportunity for students to see that this conservative institution of the law can actually be used in radical ways to disrupt entrenched patterns of oppression and racism.”
When Fletcher took over in the summer of 2020, in the midst of COVID-19 and nationwide protests following George Floyd’s murder, she worried that students would lack the time and energy to enroll in the rigorous program, which was entirely remote. Instead, she found demand only increased.
“When the need is greatest the students rise to the occasion — that’s the Berkeley brand,” says Fletcher, a faculty member since 1998. “Some of the best work I’ve seen from students came during the pandemic.” — Sarah Weld
Fighting Fast Fashion
“Growing up in Oklahoma, wearing the hijab, I had to come to terms with being visibly Muslim,” Katebi, an Iranian American, told the Times. “People would call me a terrorist, or pretend to run me over.”
While some activists strive to increase garment workers’ wages, Katebi said she wants to end the system “that puts workers in these positions to begin with.” She described how the fast fashion system “requires violence in order to function,” asserting that “assaults on workers by managers are common, on top of the general subjugation and enforced poverty that give people little choice but to do this work.”
Featured in major media outlets such as Vogue and the BBC, Katebi also noted in the Q&A how the fashion industry fuels climate change, contributing more greenhouse gases than all maritime shipping and air travel combined.
“One in six people in the world works in the fashion industry,” she said. “No one knows this because the majority of them are working-class women of color. In Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, factories will intentionally hire undocumented workers and then not pay them for months. When the workers get upset, management calls ICE and has a self-reported raid of their own factory. Some of our former Blue Tin members have gone through that process.” — Andrew Cohen
Listen In
Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s “More Just” podcast wrapped up its first season with timely episodes on Critical Race Theory, the future of abortion rights in the post-Roe v. Wade era, and free speech on campus. In a bonus episode, Chemerinsky breaks down the U.S. Supreme Court’s sweeping term with veteran journalist Joan Biskupic.
“Borderlines,” hosted by Professor Katerina Linos, continues to explore international law and human rights, including an episode with Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago discussing his recent book, Democracies and International Law.
“Do You Even Have a Tech Degree?” from the Berkeley Technology Law Journal looks at the most pressing issues in technology. Recent episodes include Professor Molly Van Houweling on intellectual property in the Metaverse and an up-close look at the California Privacy Protection Agency featuring its first chair: Professor Jennifer Urban ’00. — Gwyneth K. Shaw
North Star
On behalf of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Sun and clinic Supervising Attorney Megan Graham argued in the U.S. District Court of Minnesota that the public has the right to access government requests for electronic surveillance records and court orders resulting from those requests.
“An incredible learning experience,” says Sun, whose prep work included simulations with Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Orin Kerr. “A court hearing is live and active. You’re anticipating and trying to shape the argument as it’s proceeding.”
The clinic filed suit in December 2020, asking the court to change its sealing practices for certain types of search warrant materials and surveillance orders — and arguing that the First Amendment and common law require public access to them.
Currently, the government can compel third parties like Google and Facebook to disclose the contents of or information about users’ communications, such as emails, phone records, and location data. But documents related to government requests for court orders and warrants are often hidden from public view.
“We’re incredibly grateful for the top-notch legal representation that the clinic, and Megan and Jen in particular, have provided in this important case,” says Reporters Committee Legal Director Katie Townsend.
The Samuelson Clinic offers oral advocacy opportunities as frequently as possible to students, who have testified before the Copyright Office and advocated before the Oakland City Council.
“The heart of Berkeley’s emphasis on experiential education is putting students into the role of a lawyer,” says clinic Director Catherine Crump, co-counsel in the case. “There is nothing quite like having students stand up and advocate before decision-makers.” — Sarah Weld
Center Stage
Louise Bedsworth leads the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) after joining last year as director of its Land Use Program and senior advisor to its California-China Climate Institute. Bedsworth spent almost a decade working for the state, as executive director of the Strategic Growth Council and deputy director of the Office of Planning and Research under then-Gov. Jerry Brown.
“We had other very strong candidates,” says Professor Daniel Farber, CLEE’s faculty director, “but Louise stood out for the range of the strengths that she’ll bring to the job.”
As the climate crisis grows more urgent, Bedsworth is thrilled to lead the center.
“CLEE has built a tremendous reputation as a source for thoughtful and practical solutions for complex environmental challenges,” she says. “I’m excited to build on this strong foundation.”
Christina Chung, an advocate for low-wage workers for more than 20 years, joined the Center for Law and Work as its founding executive director. The center was launched by Professors Catherine Fisk ’86, Catherine Albiston ’93, and Lauren Edelman ’86 in late 2020.
“She knows an extraordinary amount about the wide range of California labor laws and the state’s legislative and administrative process,” Fisk says. “And she knows a huge number and array of lawyers and community activists in California and nationally.”
A seasoned lawyer appointed to state positions by Brown and Gov. Gavin Newsom, Chung was a top aide to the state’s labor secretary and labor commissioner. She shepherded the creation of the SEED program, which has granted about $30 million to help build worker cooperatives and socially responsible small businesses in undocumented and limited English proficient communities.
“What we do in this state has such a tremendous impact nationally,” Chung says. “I’m really excited to examine what we’ve accomplished here and what we’ve failed to do or haven’t conceived of yet, and to use this as a springboard to develop model economic justice policies.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw
Addressing Racism, Advancing Equity
The project reviewed 25 scholarly books, 27 reports, several web-based organizational policy platforms, and virtually the entire range of material connected to racial equity from the 2020 presidential campaigns. Nahlee Lin ’22 — a recent research assistant with Institute Director and Berkeley Law Professor john a. powell — played a key role in pushing the project forward.
“She tracked down numerous recommendations contained in books, journal articles, and other sources,” says Stephen Menendian, the institute’s director of research. “Nahlee did a phenomenal job helping review the source materials and inputting the recommendations.”
The repository, which will be continually updated, focuses on eight main areas: police reform and the use of force, homeownership subsidies, rental assistance, baby bonds and other wealth-building tools, strengthening community-based and Black-owned financial institutions, universal pre-K, ending zero-tolerance school disciplinary policies, and forgiving student debt.
Additional policy areas discussed include reparations, vocational job training and community college, measures to strengthen voting rights, and bail reform.
Lin and other researchers identified major reform challenges to addressing structural racism, such as limited budgets, ideological and political opposition, legal and constitutional limitations on explicitly including race in policymaking, and resistance to policy implementation.
“I believed this repository could be a useful resource for a wide range of groups … who are working towards racial justice,” Lin says. “It consolidates expert policy recommendations in a way that’s accessible and that can minimize ‘reinventing the wheel.’” — Andrew Cohen