In Brief

A MOD LOOK: Students in one mod created memorable swag honoring Professor David Hausman’s dog Ernie.

This fall, Berkeley Law’s 1L students began enjoying smaller sections of their required courses, thanks to a challenging move years in the making.

First-year students had been split into three modules, or “supermods,” with their required fall courses: Civil Procedure, Criminal Law, Contracts, and Torts. Students also have one small mod course to encourage connections between one another and a faculty member.

With 1L cohorts topping 300 in recent years, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky added a fourth supermod to reduce class sizes — which required major shuffling to keep student and faculty schedules reasonable and ensure classroom space for all courses.

Each supermod has 87 or 88 students, down from an average of 114 last year, while small mod, Legal Research and Writing, and Written and Oral Advocacy class sizes have also shrunk. Chemerinsky calls the move “one of the most important changes in the law school during my time as dean … I think these smaller classes will really matter in the education of our students and their 1L experience.”

Mods are a critical social connector for students, who often refer to themselves by their mod number. They plan outings and events through the first year and beyond, and some alumni even decades later fondly recall friendships made in their mod.

Last year, students in Professor David Hausman’s Civil Procedure course designed a logo and put it on hats to commemorate their bond with each other, Hausman, and his dog Ernie.

“The great thing about a small class is not just that I (and Ernie) get to know the students, but also that they get to know each other,” Hausman says. “When you know your classmates, you’re less worried about speaking up in class and more able to think about what everyone’s really interested in: the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw

CONVENER: Berkeley Center for Law and Business Executive Director Angeli Patel ’20 helped organize the summit. Photo by Jim Block

From the inaugural Berkeley Corporate + Climate Summit to a new online executive education course, Berkeley Law continues to lead practitioners, executives, and policymakers in exploring how to best incorporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) priorities into long-term business strategy.

At the two-day spring summit, presented by the school’s Berkeley Center for Law and Business (BCLB) and Center for Law, Energy & the Environment along with the American Bar Association, corporate, government, nonprofit, and academic experts discussed strategies for companies to propel a more sustainable economy. Experts discussed internal changes within businesses to address climate concerns — and external pushback against the ESG movement.

“This is the first conference about climate on the corporate side at any law school in the country,” said Susan Mac Cormac, who co-chairs Morrison Foerster’s ESG + Sustainability and Social Enterprise + Impact Investing practices. “The fact that Berkeley is taking a leading role is really special and speaks about the institution and the people who work and teach here.”

Berkeley Law’s ESG University course provides key developments and ideas to corporate and legal leaders through two tracks: the 30-hour Sustainable Capitalism in Practice for lawyers, regulators, policy practitioners, and those in media and communications, while the 8-hour Sustainable Capitalism for Directors is aimed at corporate board directors and C-suite executives.

Both self-paced classes incorporate interviews, excerpts of academic papers and industry reports, opinion pieces, and ESG media coverage. They also offer live office hours with BCLB Executive Director Angeli Patel ’20 and experts who contributed to the courses.

“Our goal is to not just create learnings for today, but to create concrete learnings that will have payoff for executives and for their companies over the long term,” Patel says. — Andrew Cohen

Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is well known for his constitutional analysis, and for his even-keeled approach to it. Which makes the title of his latest book — No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States — a bit unnerving.

He argues that America’s growing polarization can be traced to the Constitution’s fundamental defects and judicial rulings that entrench minority rule instead of democracy. Chemerinsky writes that such measures must be overhauled or replaced entirely in order to avoid eventual secession, and offers suggestions for both possibilities.

Noting that just 15 of the nearly 12,000 amendments proposed since 1789 have passed, he points to a governing system steadily diminishing in effectiveness, public confidence, and democratic principles. Chemerinsky says a new constitutional convention to replace the Constitution of 1787 could be a viable avenue, similar to how the Founding Fathers replaced the outdated Articles of Confederation.

A best-selling author of 15 books, Chemerinsky was named the most influential person in U.S. legal education by National Jurist in 2014 and 2017.

Top legal scholars describe his new book as “must reading for anyone who cares about this nation and its future,” “a piercing diagnosis of the state of American democracy,” “a powerful and profound work of scholarship and reasoning,” and “a powerful indictment of the U.S. constitutional system but also a clarifying call to remake our supreme law before it’s too late.” — Andrew Cohen

SHOP TALK: Liam Mahagan ’24 (left) chats with Sher Edling’s Naomi Wheeler ’21 at Berkeley Law’s first plaintiff-side career fair. Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small

Last spring, Berkeley Law held its first-ever career fair with plaintiff-side firms, the latest step by the school’s Career Development Office (CDO) to foster a broader set of career pathways for students.

“The CDO has been working tirelessly to make it easier for students to find, apply, and secure coveted summer and post-grad jobs with nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and plaintiff-side and public interest law firms,” says Assistant Dean of Career Development Eric Stern.

The student-led Plaintiffs’ Law Association (PLA) and CDO co-hosted the event, which drew more than 60 students and 18 plaintiff-side firms from the Bay Area, Southern California, and beyond.

A lot of attorneys who attended were law school alums — and enthused, says Associate Director for Private Sector Counseling and Programs Leslie Hauser. She adds that many participating firms expressed interest in learning how to recruit Berkeley Law students and that all said they’d never been invited to an event specifically aimed at plaintiff-side firms.

The career fair reflects growing interest among students in this type of work and the law school’s efforts to support it. With around 200 members and a 14-student board, the PLA is connecting with a larger national movement to promote the field as an alternative to large firms and corporate defense work for students interested in litigation.

Lecturer Ted Mermin ’96, executive director of the school’s Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice, praised the work of PLA students and CDO leaders to build a program that simply didn’t exist before.

“They have opened doors where most students didn’t even know there were walls,” he says. “All of this effort has generated enormous enthusiasm among students and admiration throughout the Berkeley Law community.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw

The Class of 2024 displayed Berkeley Law’s fervent commitment to pro bono legal work.

Four years after its revealing report found racial discrimination by prosecutors a consistent feature of jury selection in California, Berkeley Law’s Death Penalty Clinic has cataloged the states that gather prospective jurors’ self-identified race and ethnicity — and those that don’t.

Its follow-up report, Guess Who’s Coming to Jury Duty?, was fueled by realizing the effectiveness of a 2020 California bill aimed at making juries more representative of state demographics could not be reliably measured.

“We see and hear about changes, but it’s anecdotal,” says Professor and Clinic Co-Director Elisabeth Semel. “There’s no way to know the racial and ethnic composition of California’s prospective jurors responding to summonses or entering the courtroom, or the final jury itself.”

Semel, students Casey Jang ’23, Willy Ramirez ’23, and Yara Slaton ’23, and Clinical Program paralegal Lauren Havey researched if — and how — other states collect prospective jurors’ self-identified race and ethnicity. Nineteen states, Washington, D.C., and federal district courts collect such data from source lists or prospective jurors.

Slaton saw how “wildly inconsistent the practices are in this country, which means defendants are getting wildly different jury experiences.” The report proposes that jury summons questionnaires include spaces to identify race, ethnicity, and other demographic data, and that such information be available to the trial court and counsel before jury selection.

Absent this information, the report explains, lawyers and judges often rely — consciously or unconsciously — on stereotypes to identify jurors’ race and ethnicity and as a reason to strike them.

Center for Jury Studies Director Paula Hannaford-Agor says the findings will encourage more data collection procedures to help “determine whether reform efforts are having their intended effect and, if not, help identify additional steps.”

Cautions Semel, “We cannot be blind to the ways in which racial discrimination — whether explicit or implicit — continues to whitewash jury boxes.” — Sarah Weld

FAMILY MAN: Deported U.S. Army veteran Jeff Brown, shown here with his son in Jamaica, is featured in the report.

Despite vast and maddening bureaucratic hurdles, Berkeley Law’s Veterans Law Practicum remains committed to clearing a path for deported military veterans to access life-changing services.

Ten current and recent students, many veterans themselves, researched and co-drafted a report detailing myriad barriers these former service members face to medical care and disability benefits from the federal Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

While humanitarian parole lets veterans reenter the U.S. temporarily to gain VA health care services, travel costs are a deterrent and applications are regularly rejected. The VA Foreign Medical Program offers health care services overseas, but only covers treatment for disabilities that it deems to be “service-connected.”

The U.S. has deported thousands of veterans, often before they finish their disability compensation applications. Obtaining benefits for an injury sustained during military service generally requires medical evidence, extensive communication with the VA, evaluation by a VA-chosen clinician, and sometimes a hearing — too onerous for many deported veterans to overcome.

Because service traumas greatly increase the likelihood of criminalized behavior, noncitizen veterans face a high risk of deportation. The report notes, “Among those exiled are combat veterans and individuals who served honorably in every branch of the military.”

Suggested changes include bolstering VA ability to provide health care outside the U.S., simplifying the disability compensation process, and removing humanitarian parole obstacles.

“I believe that improving the treatment of veterans is a goal shared across the political spectrum, and immigrant veterans are an absolutely crucial part of that group,” says former Navy submarine officer and report co-author Eric Provost ’24. “The facilities and funds exist to ensure that immigrant veterans and service members have greater access to naturalization. The Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the VA just need to make it a priority.” — Andrew Cohen

A NEW ROLE: Human rights lawyer Omar Gómez Trejo had to leave Mexico and now works with Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center. Photo by Philip Pacheco

Forced to flee his native Mexico after investigating the disappearance of 43 student protesters, Omar Gómez Trejo recently joined Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center (HRC) through a program that brings threatened international scholars to the Bay Area.

Mexico’s government claimed a local gang was responsible for the 2014 abduction. But as special prosecutor of the Ayotzinapa case from 2019 to 2022, Trejo and his team unearthed how the government planted and hid evidence, forced confessions, and disrupted investigation efforts.

After indicting over 100 people — public officials, military leaders, organized crime members, and more — Trejo was forced to resign in September 2022. Soon after, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador began publicly accusing him of trying to spark a rebellion.

“It put me and my family at risk,” Trejo says. “That’s why I decided to leave Mexico.”

Once in the United States, he received a scholarship from an initiative called Practitioners at Risk and HRC quickly brought him aboard.

“The people at HRC are the best,” Trejo says. “They’ve offered me friendship and training to learn new tools and grow professionally.”

This semester, he is developing an inventory of his team’s investigative practices, teaching a course on the Ayotzinapa case, and giving guest lectures in other courses.

Ten years have passed since the mass disappearance. While Trejo acknowledges the barriers and complexities involved when a nation must investigate itself — especially in a country where 95% of crimes go unsolved — he remains hopeful.

“The state has powerful tools and can achieve its objectives when used correctly and in accordance with the law,” he says. “It’s necessary to demilitarize the country and strengthen the civil police. The separation of powers should be respected, but above all the autonomy and independence of prosecutors and judges must be respected.” — Andrew Cohen

Want to hear more about the pathbreaking research and exciting advocacy happening here? Now, there’s a new way to dive deep: the podcast “Berkeley Law Voices Carry.”

It’s a showcase for the many ways the school’s faculty, students, and staff are making an impact — in California, across the country, and around the world — and it’s available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Here are some highlights:

• Professor Colleen V. Chien talking about her work spanning the fields of innovation, intellectual property, and the criminal justice system, particularly her groundbreaking Innovator Diversity Pilots Initiative and Paper Prisons Initiative.
• Professors Tejas N. Narechania and Rebecca Wexler discussing the challenges of governing artificial intelligence from the regulatory and platform angle as well as its growing impact on the criminal justice system.
• Dave Jones, director of the Climate Risk Initiative at our Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) and a former California insurance commissioner, analyzing the major threats climate change poses to the insurance industry and the accompanying new risks.
• Professor Jonah B. Gelbach describing why scholars are pushing to drop the paywall on the Public Access to Court Electronic Records database — the online repository of more than 1 billion federal court records, commonly referred to as PACER — so more researchers, journalists, and members of the public can analyze what’s going on inside our courthouses.
• CLEE Executive Director Louise Bedsworth and Professors Daniel Farber and Sharon Jacobs examining the future of climate, energy, and environmental policy in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the 40-year-old Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council decision.
• Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice Executive Director Ted Mermin ’96 outlining the school’s expanding consumer law offerings, from an array of exciting courses to multiple hands-on opportunities for students. — Gwyneth K. Shaw

EYEING CHANGE: Alexis Tatum ’25 views a PowerPoint slide during a presentation on the reparations movement’s history. Photo by Darius Riley

Leaders of the Berkeley Journal of Black Law & Policy know the subject can get heated and divisive. But they see reparations, the journal’s 30th anniversary symposium subject, as more logical development than wistful wish.

“It’s a contentious topic, as are many that involve race,” said Editor in Chief Alexis Tatum ’25. “But that’s not a reason to shy away from it. It’s not that crazy an idea in our legal system to atone for past wrongs. That’s what the law is regularly used for.”

The symposium included attorneys, scholars, and California Reparations Task Force members who outlined arguments for reparations and hurdles to achieving them. After holding 16 public meetings and spending over two years studying and developing proposals, last year the task force submitted an 1,100-page report with 115 recommendations that identified five main areas of California-specific harm: incarceration and overpolicing, housing segregation, unjust property taking, health harms, and devaluation of Black businesses.

Task force Chair Kamila Moore outlined the history of the reparations movement. She noted that white households on average own nine times more assets than Black households, California is the nation’s sixth most segregated state in schooling, and Black people are highly overrepresented in foster care, juvenile proceedings, and both arrest and conviction rates.

Other topics included the backlash against critical race theory, racial exploitation in copyright law, police violence, and how 30-plus states have enacted rules limiting how racism is taught in schools.

“We’re not recommending that California give money to Black Americans, we’re recommending that it return money to Black Americans,” said task force member Don Tamaki ’76. “The cost of not reckoning with what has happened is far more costly than the cost of reparations. Society is paying for this every day in housing, health care, and more.” — Andrew Cohen

GOING DIGITAL: Specially designed equipment is used to carefully digitize scores of old and valued texts. Photo by Caitlin Keller

In the summer of 2023, some 1,600 pounds of equipment began arriving at Berkeley Law’s Robbins Collection and Research Center, launching an ambitious project to digitize hundreds of manuscripts. The initiative will significantly expand the collection’s digital holdings — and access to its resources.

“This will preserve our rarest and most unique manuscripts for generations to come,” says Professor and Robbins Collection and Research Center Director Laurent Mayali. “The collection was established to promote and encourage comparative study in religious and civil law to solve the legal problems of today.”

More than 350 manuscript volumes — written in Latin, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, English, French, German, and Arabic — have been digitized, with the oldest dating to the 12th century. Comprising almost 200,000 pages, many of these manuscripts are extremely rare texts.

The project will take over a year to complete, and PDF versions will be available for research access by early 2025. The second phase of the project began digitizing all Robbins Collection books printed before 1500 in June.

“The recent global shutdown and the inability to travel for a substantial period had a significant impact on scholars,” says senior reference librarian Jennifer K. Nelson. “The question of access came front and center, motivating us to digitize those items that are unique to our collection.”

Dual overhead cameras, which use a specially designed book-cradle system, help protect the materials. Some manuscripts have burn holes, fragile binding, or extremely delicate paper — all of which require careful handling during the imaging process.

As Robbins Collection and Research Center Assistant Director Emily Best explains, “Our first priority is to ensure the safety and meticulous handling of our manuscripts.” — Robbins Collection and Research Center staff