Flourishing Faculty
Professor
Alina Ball
Professor
Jason Ferguson
Brian Galle
Joy Milligan
Bertrall Ross
Professor
Ryan Sakoda
Kevin Washburn
Illustrations by Ivan Canu
Flourishing Faculty
Professor
Alina Ball
Professor
Jason Ferguson
Brian Galle
Joy Milligan
Bertrall Ross
Professor
Ryan Sakoda
Kevin Washburn
Illustrations by Ivan Canu
Four senior scholars — Professors Brian Galle, Joy Milligan Ph.D. ’18, Bertrall Ross, and Kevin Washburn — join Assistant Professors Jason Ferguson and Ryan Sakoda and Clinical Professor Alina Ball as the school’s new hires. They’re the latest in a transformative wave of hiring since Dean Erwin Chemerinsky arrived in 2017.
“We had a spectacular year in faculty hiring. We’ve added terrific faculty in many different fields who will be great classroom teachers as well as influential scholars,” Chemerinsky says. “We are tremendously fortunate to have them join us.”
It’s a homecoming for several of them: Ross and Milligan return to the law school after four years at the University of Virginia School of Law, Ball is an East Bay native, Ferguson got his Ph.D. in UC Berkeley’s Department of Sociology, and Sakoda was an undergraduate at the university.
“My time away helped me remember and appreciate the unique qualities associated with Berkeley Law,” Ross says. “I was drawn back because I love the people there: those who were there when I left and the many new additions I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to spend time with since I left.
“Berkeley Law tends to draw a type of person who is intellectually curious beyond the bounds of ordinary legal discussion, who is serious yet does not take themselves too seriously, who cares about the world beyond the institution, and who is generally just fun to be around.”
Others were eager to join the faculty because of the school’s storied history as a leader in many areas of legal academia and its commitment to serving the public.
“It’s a wonderful public law school,” says Washburn, a specialist in Indian law who counts the late Professor and fellow Indian law expert Philip Frickey as a mentor. After a distinguished career — including stints as law school dean at the University of Iowa and the University of New Mexico, and service as the Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Interior under President Barack Obama — the school’s public mission focus was alluring.
“I have always been a public servant in one way or the other, with my entire career in the federal government or in public law schools, and that really appealed to me,” Washburn adds. “Berkeley’s just such a strong law school.”
Here’s a closer look at each of these accomplished new additions.
- Recent scholarship:
- Social Enterprise Governance Post-SOX, Business Lawyer (2023)
- Transactional Community Lawyering, Temple Law Review (2022)
Clinical Professor
Alina Ball
“This is an opportunity to build on the work that I’ve been doing over the last decade, but now I can take that to a deeper level,” says Ball, who ran a similar clinic at UC Law San Francisco.
Ball’s career as a clinical professor grew out of her passion for two distinct areas: transactional law and racial justice. She went to UCLA Law knowing she wanted to do transactional work in economically marginalized communities.
“Lawyers have been doing this type of work for a really long time, but there weren’t ready-made pathways to how to do this — there wasn’t a guide of how to be a transactional social justice lawyer,” she says.
Ball worked at Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., focusing on representing private and public companies in debt, equity, and M&A transactions. She then got a teaching fellowship at Georgetown Law, where she also earned an LL.M.
Ball says, “My two guiding principles have always been a desire to use the technical skills that allow me to do creative problem solving within communities that I deeply care about and authenticity — really making sure that I’m able to live my values in the work that I’m doing.”
- Recent scholarship:
- The Great Refusal: The West, the Rest and the Geopolitics of Homosexuality (Under contract, Princeton University Press)
- ‘There Is an Eye on Us’: International Imitation, Popular Representation, and the Regulation of Homosexuality in Senegal, American Sociological Review (2021)
Assistant Professor
Jason Ferguson
“When I was a Ph.D. student, I was fortunate enough to learn about this extraordinary interdisciplinary program in law and society housed inside the law school,” says Ferguson, who spent four years teaching at UCLA and last year at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
“Both JSP and the affiliated Center for the Study of Law and Society were major resources for me and played an important role in my turn toward the critical study of law in context and law in action,” he adds. “I look forward to taking advantage of the multidisciplinary environment and the fruitful intellectual exchanges with colleagues across the law school.”
JSP and the broader institution is an ideal place to further his research, Ferguson says. Mining the intersection of the sociology of law, neo-institutional theory, political sociology, and global and transnational studies, he uses statistical, archival, interviewing, and ethnographic tools to analyze a range of social phenomena, including the structure and evolution of laws regulating sexuality.
“In my scholarship and teaching, I seek to marry sustained engagement with social theory and methodologically rigorous empirical research,” he says. “I’m positive this exciting intellectual environment will open up new vistas for my scholarship and bring my work to new audiences.”
- Recent scholarship:
- Taxing Dynasties, University of Pennsylvania Law Review (Forthcoming 2026, with David Gamage and Robert Lord)
- The Constitutional Money Problem, University of Chicago Law Review (2025)
Professor
Brian Galle
“It’s an amazing opportunity to be at not only one of the world’s great universities, but one which happens to have probably one of the handful of the best tax economics departments in the world, as well as one of the leading departments of behavioral economics,” says Galle, who has authored a number of amicus briefs cited by the Supreme Court in tax cases. “Being right there and able to walk and get a coffee, go to an economics workshop, then come back and teach your class seems pretty awesome.”
Galle co-authored a study with UC Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez examining California’s recent wealth tax proposals and is currently at work on a monograph called “How to Tax the Rich” — a salient topic given the giant tax package recently passed in Congress and signed by President Donald Trump.
“This bill will create a gigantic fiscal mess, and greatly enrich the Americans who are already the richest,” Galle says. “So how do we get out of that? We raise a lot of money, probably from those people.
“The book is about how to do that, efficiently and legally.”
- Recent scholarship:
- Beyond Equity: The Counterfactual Administrative State, Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy (2024)
- Animus and Its Distortion of the Past, Alabama Law Review (2023)
Professor
Joy Milligan
“I’ve always been in awe of the intellectual community that is Berkeley Law,” she says. “Many of my intellectual mentors and the people I admire most are the faculty that I get to be colleagues with now.”
Milligan, a former civil rights lawyer, shifted to teaching constitutional law at Virginia. Her scholarship has moved in a parallel direction, expanding from civil rights and legal history to constitutional theory. In the coming academic year she will be on sabbatical and working on a book with Ross, Democracy and the Constitution: Addressing the Legacy of Exclusion, while both are Steven M. Polan Fellows in Constitutional Law and History, a program run by the Brennan Center for Justice.
“It’s been fun to start that new line of teaching and research,” Milligan says. “Our project centers on the question of how we live with, interpret, and govern ourselves with a Constitution that wasn’t really written for all of us, so it dovetails nicely with the broader kind of histories I’ve always been interested in.”
At Berkeley, Milligan will take on a new role as co-director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality & Antidiscri-mination Law. She will join founding director Professor David Oppenheimer, who began the center in 2010 and has grown it to a global network of over 1,000 academics, advocates, and activists researching and collaborating on equality law and policy. The project is close to her heart, since she participated as a graduate student during the center’s founding.
- Recent scholarship:
- Students, Power, and Technology, Berkeley Journal of Law & Technology (Forthcoming 2025, with Mona Sloane and Ella Duus)
- Artificial Intelligence and Democracy’s Information Problem, University of Pittsburgh Law Review (Forthcoming 2025)
Professor
Bertrall Ross
“I am excited about plotting with students and my colleagues on how to address the critical issues we confront as a country,” he says. “I am excited to step in the classroom and be challenged and pushed by my students as I hopefully open their minds to thinking about things in a way that they hadn’t before.”
Ross will also take on a new challenge, as co-faculty director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy with Professor Daniel A. Farber. Founded in fall 2024 after the death of the law school’s beloved former dean Christopher Edley Jr., a national political and policy influence for decades, the center aims to defend and strengthen democratic institutions in the United States through actionable research and public leadership.
The center recently hired renowned public service lawyer Catherine E. Lhamon to serve as its executive director (see In Defence of Democracy).
The position “means so much to me, given how pivotal a figure Chris Edley was for my early career,” Ross says. “He was the dean who hired me and in his own unique way, he was the dean that pushed me to believe that I belonged. I am excited to work with Dan Farber, Catherine Lhamon, students, and other collaborators to address the many challenges that democracy is currently facing and to carry on Chris’s legacy as a social justice advocate.”
In addition to his project with Milligan, Ross is at work on three other books.
- Recent scholarship:
- Theorizing Legal Vulnerability to Enhance Rural Access to Justice, South Dakota Law Review (2024, with Brian R. Farrell and Daria Fisher Page)
- The Architecture of Discretion: Implications of the Structure of Sanctions for Racial Disparities, Severity, and Net Widening, Northwestern University Law Review (2023)
Assistant Professor
Ryan Sakoda
He was also a Fulbright Scholar, a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine, and a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago, and worked in the Boston public defender’s office as a Liman Public Interest Fellow and later as a staff attorney.
An empirical researcher of crime and criminal justice policy, Sakoda dovetails with the law school’s deep bench of data-driven researchers, particularly those using the economist’s toolbox.
“There is so much that excites me about joining Berkeley Law,” Sakoda says. “The faculty has an incredible scope and depth of expertise, and I look forward to working with and learning from all of my new colleagues.
“I’m particularly excited about collaborating with our criminal law faculty as well as our faculty working at the intersection of law and the social sciences.”
Sakoda’s research examines how the government’s enforcement of criminal punishment affects both individual outcomes and systemic inequalities, and includes articles about probation, post-release supervision, and solitary confinement. He is currently studying legal representation in criminal cases, and has pursued research related to access to justice more generally as well as how interventions in other areas of law can impact persistent socioeconomic inequality.
- Recent scholarship:
- Landback as Federal Policy, UCLA Law Review (2025)
- Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law (2024)
Professor
Kevin Washburn
More recently, he’s turned to tribal conservation and co-management of federal public lands, and an ambitious new path trying to identify the reasons why tribes pay higher interest rates than municipal governments or corporations when they issue bonds to finance development projects.
Washburn was drawn to UC Berkeley Law by its robust — and growing — commitment to recruiting and training students of Native American and Indigenous descent. Professor Seth Davis helped revive the school’s Native American Law Students Association chapter and founded the Center for Indigenous Law & Justice, which hired Merri Lopez-Keifer (see A Leading Voice for Tribal Sovereignty) as its first executive director earlier this year.
Under the leadership of Chief Administrative Officer Kristin Theis-Alvarez, then dean of admissions and financial aid, the school began supplementing UC Berkeley’s Native American Opportunity Plan to make law school more affordable for in-state students enrolled in federally recognized Native American, American Indian, and Alaska Native tribes.
Washburn says he recently went to the largest annual Indian law conference and there were 18 UC Berkeley Law students — the most of any law school.
“That commitment was huge, because I want to be around students who are interested in what I do and interested in pursuing a career in that area,” he says.