Study Hall

Selected Faculty Scholarship

Award-Winning Excellence

Faculty Honors:

From trailblazing scholarship and extraordinary teaching to visionary leadership and meaningful mentoring, Berkeley Law faculty members have been festooned with a bevy of prestigious national and campus-wide honors this year.

Professor Jennifer Urban giving this year’s Benjamin Ide Wheeler Society Lecture
SELECTED SCHOLAR: Professor Jennifer M. Urban ’00, chair of the California Privacy Protection Agency, was chosen to give this year’s Benjamin Ide Wheeler Society Lecture. Photo by Keegan Houser

Lauren Edelman ’86 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a leading honorary society and independent research center for leaders from varied disciplines to address major challenges. A past Law and Society Association president and Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Edelman confronts the revealing interplay between organizations and their legal environments.

Osagie K. Obasogie won a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship to further his groundbreaking scholarship probing the intersection of race, medicine, and the law. He plans to use the opportunity to expand his work on “excited delirium,” a vague and controversial term often used by medical examiners as well as coroners to explain why community members die in police custody.
Professor Victoria Plaut stands smiling outside a building
IN CHARGE: Professor Victoria Plaut was recently named UC Berkeley’s new vice provost for the faculty. Photo by Neil Freese
An expert on the psychological science of diversity, Victoria Plaut was named UC Berkeley’s new vice provost for the faculty. On Aug. 15, she began oversight of building, supporting, and maintaining the faculty in close collaboration with deans, department chairs, and others. Plaut recently chaired the Academic Senate’s Budget and Interdepartmental Relations Committee.
Civil procedure expert Andrew Bradt won UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award, one of just five campus educators recognized this year. The award honors teaching that incites intellectual curiosity, engages students deeply in the enterprise of learning, makes them aware of key relationships between the academy and the world at large, and inspires colleagues.
Abbye Atkinson, an authority on credit, debt, and inequality, is the first recipient of the American Constitution Society’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg Scholar Award. The award honors a top scholar in the early stages of their career who has shown scholarly excellence, the ability to imagine how society can be more just and more equal, and the determination to pursue that goal.
Robert Merges received the PatCon Extraordinary Achievement Award for his leading scholarship about the patent system. The Patent Conference (PatCon) is the world’s largest annual gathering for experts in the field to share their research and explore new developments. Merges is America’s second-most cited intellectual property scholar, according to a recent study.
Policy Advocacy Clinic Associate Director Stephanie Campos-Bui ’14 won the university’s Chancellor Award for Community-Engaged Teaching, which honors those who lead students in community-based courses or research. Her work on abolishing fines and fees in California’s juvenile and criminal legal systems helped accelerate a movement to eliminate them nationwide.
Calvin Morrill was one of two winners of the Law and Society Association’s 2022 Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award. A longtime leader in graduate sociolegal studies, Morrill has served on 44 Ph.D. committees and chaired over half of them. Many of the people he supervised have co-authored publications with him and become leading researchers, scholars, and teachers.
Jennifer M. Urban ’00 gave UC Berkeley’s annual Benjamin Ide Wheeler Society Lecture in July. Director of policy initiatives at the school’s Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, she discussed the public’s growing privacy demands, how legislative efforts are responsive to those concerns, and the challenges of protecting privacy rights in a data-hungry age.

Faculty Papers:

Berkeley Law’s public mission demands scholarship that tackles pressing matters facing society, and its professors continue to meet that obligation head-on. Here are some examples of recent faculty papers that confront key issues within finance, privacy, refugee migration, corporate governance, artificial intelligence, and much more.

PAUL SCHWARTZ
WITH DANIEL J. SOLOVE
ALI Data Privacy: Overview and Black Letter Text
UCLA Law Review
The reporters for the American Law Institute Principles of Law, Data Privacy describe their project and how it serves as a blueprint for policymakers to regulate privacy comprehensively and effectively. Saying the United States has “clung stubbornly to a fragmented, inconsistent patchwork of laws,” they propose principles for legislation consistent with key foundations in the U.S. approach to privacy that also better align the nation with the European Union.
STAVROS GADINIS
WITH AMELIA MIAZAD ’02
A Test of Stakeholder Governance
Journal of Corporation Law
The authors allay concerns that the COVID-19 pandemic threatens the stakeholder governance movement, which prods companies to look beyond profit maximization and also serve societal concerns from workplace equity to climate change into their decisions. Their research of companies from industries that both fared well and not well during the pandemic finds that they turned to stakeholders with increasing frequency for input on issues central to their business.
ANDREA ROTH
The Lost Right to Jury Trial in ‘All’ Criminal Prosecutions
Duke Law Journal
Though the Constitution states that those accused of a crime are entitled to a jury trial, tens of thousands of federal defendants each year are denied a jury by the “petty-offense” exception born in the 19th century. Probing untapped historical and textual sources, Roth says the exception’s current rationales are untenable. She examines a jury right’s implications in federal petty cases, for state defendants, and for the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.
ROBERT BARTLETT
WITH JUSTIN MCCRARY & MAUREEN O’HARA
The Market Inside the Market: Odd-Lot Quotes
Annual Conference on Financial Market Regulation
Bartlett and his co-authors say current market practices relating to odd lot quotes (order amounts for a security that are less than the normal trading unit) result in a large “inside” market where for many stocks, better prices routinely exist relative to the National Best Bid or Offer. Using a learning prediction algorithm where odd lot data predicts future prices, the paper shows how traders with access to such data gain a simple and profitable strategy.
SEAN FARHANG
WITH STEPHEN B. BURBANK
Politics, Identity, and Pleading Decisions on the U.S. Courts of Appeals
University of Pennsylvania Law Review
Reviewing an empirical study of appeals from rulings on motions to dismiss for failure to state a viable claim, the authors find that judicial panels with women judges are far more likely to rule in favor of a plaintiff reaching discovery. The results contradict conventional wisdom that women judges’ preferences differ from men’s only in cases implicating discrimination, and show that gender has a notable impact on discovery rulings beyond civil rights cases.
SARAH SONG
WITH IRENE BLOEMRAAD
Immigrant Legalization: A Dilemma Between Justice and the Rule of Law
Migration Studies
Immigrant legalization policies pose a vexing ethical dilemma between justice and the rule of law. Clarifying each horn, Song and her co-author reappraise these policies by examining empirical evidence about their effects and reflecting on the value of the rule of law. Contending that legalization policies can help enhance the rule of law and mitigate this dilemma, they propose five rule of law arguments in support of legalization and discuss some policy implications of their analysis.
REBECCA GOLDSTEIN
WITH DEVAH PAGER, HELEN HO, & BRUCE WESTERN
Criminalizing Poverty: The Consequences of Court Fees in a Randomized Experiment
American Sociological Review
Court-related fines and fees are routinely levied on poor criminal defendants who have little capacity to pay. Goldstein and her co-authors show how that inability to meet the financial burdens of the legal process may create a troubling criminalization of poverty. Testing that hypothesis with misdemeanor defendants in an Oklahoma county, the study found that such fines and fees put the defendants at heightened risk of ongoing court involvement through both new warrants and debt collection.
JONATHAN GLATER
WITH KATE ELENGOLD
Qualified Sovereignty
Washington Law Review
Private federal contractors often exploit three “sovereign shield” defenses in cases against them — preemption, derivative sovereign immunity, and derivative intergovernmental immunity — in order to evade liability. Glater and his co-author propose three prisms to assess legal accountability: did the contractor act as the government’s agent, did it comply with government-established guidelines, and was it reasonable to believe its conduct would not violate rights protected by law.
ANDREW BRADT
WITH MAGGIE GARDNER, PAMELA K. BOOKMAN, ZACHARY D. CLOPTON, & D. THEODORE RAVE
The False Promise of General Jurisdiction
Alabama Law Review
While the U.S. Supreme Court has stated that general jurisdiction provides a clear and certain forum to sue defendants, Bradt and his co-authors argue this is not so in cases involving foreign or multiple defendants. Warning against the impact of that assumption, they assert that the Court’s view of general jurisdiction creates incentives for states to favor local defendants and that overreliance on it also channels litigation to states that may not want it.
SONIA KATYAL
Democracy and Distrust in an Era of Artificial Intelligence
Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Our legal system generally views that courts should defer to the legislature — except when it seems the political process has failed to recognize the rights or interests of minorities. Katyal details how the rise of decision making through artificial intelligence (AI) poses various new risks to minorities, how judicial review should function within the realm of AI, and how due process and equal protection can be recuperated in this paradigm for better oversight and accountability.
ADAM BADAWI
How Informative Is the Text of Securities Complaints?
Journal of Law, Economics & Organization
Much of the research in law and finance reduces long, complex texts down to a few variables, prompting scholars to voice concerns that doing so loses important nuance and detail. Applying text analysis and machine learning to more than 5,000 complaints filed in private securities class actions that collectively contain over 90 million words, Badawi assesses this critique and shows why a hybrid model would provide more reliable predictions for case outcomes.
DAVID OPPENHEIMER
The South African Sources of the Diversity Justification for U.S. Affirmative Action
California Law Review Online
Oppenheimer says the “diversity justification” for affirmative action has roots from South Africa’s 1950s anti-apartheid movement, and that Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell’s seminal 1978 Bakke opnion leaned on its rationale that a university’s right to select a racially diverse student body is vital to academic freedom. He argues that the opinion was more concerned with academic freedom than racial justice, and identified diversity as central to the mission of U.S. higher education.
JONAH GELBACH
Free PACER
Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice
While litigants, lawyers, and the public can now pay to obtain federal court case information through electronic searches of the judiciary’s PACER system, Gelbach explains why misguided policy choices have made access “so much less than it could be and should be.” He argues that offering free federal litigation data to the public would help scholars and journalists improve our justice system and fuel the development of more accessible and affordable legal technology.
Professor Chris Hoofnagle seated at an outdoor table holding his latest book
QUANTUM LEAP: Professor Chris Hoofnagle, the faculty director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, with his latest book. Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small

Turning the Page

T

rue to form, Berkeley Law’s prolific faculty cranked out 39 compelling books last year that explore a wide swath of meaningful issues. At a spring celebration of those publications, colleagues shared their perspective on several of them — and why they resonate. Here are just three examples:

In Law and Policy for the Quantum Age, Professor Chris Hoofnagle and co-author Simson Garfinkel detail how the rise of quantum technologies will affect countries and their citizens. They describe the history of these technologies, how they work, how they may be used for future national defense, and how companies may (or may not) profit from them.

“Chris has been helping people understand law and tech for many years now,” said Berkeley Law professor and privacy law expert Paul Schwartz, who praised his colleague’s “witty, easy to read book that enables people from different disciplines to understand the interplay between them.”

In Contested Ground: How to Understand the Limits of Presidential Power, Professor Daniel Farber synthesizes history, politics, and settled law while illuminating issues that stoke hotly contested debates about the limits of and checks on presidential authority — and describing how crucial it is for the same rules to apply to all presidents.

“This book provides an explanation for people who care about their country, their democracy, and how the world works in concrete, clear, and meaningful prose,” said fellow professor and constitutional law scholar Jennifer Chacón. “It’s clear what a wonderful teacher Dan must be.”

In Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life’s Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union, Professor Amanda Tyler — a former clerk and close friend of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — offers a curation of her legacy. Divided into five parts, the book opens with an edited transcript of Tyler’s 2019 interview with Ginsburg at UC Berkeley for the first Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture.

“I was struck by how well these different parts of the book fit together, the impact of Justice Ginsburg’s amazing life and career, how well-edited this book was, how Justice Ginsburg was such a passionate voice for justice, and how much we miss her,” Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said. — Andrew Cohen

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