Study Hall

ur strong run of faculty hiring continues, with two new members — Professor Daniel Harawa and Assistant Professor Aaron Hall — joining the law school this academic year.

Harawa will arrive in January from New York University School of Law, where he was also director of the Federal Appellate Clinic. His scholarship on race and the criminal justice system has been widely published, including a recent article, “Coloring in the Fourth Amendment,” in the Harvard Law Review.

Harawa, who began his academic career at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, practiced as a Washington, D.C., public defender and at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He earned his J.D. at Georgetown University Law Center.

“Berkeley’s public mission is something that resonates deeply with me,” Harawa says. “I consider myself at heart a lawyer’s lawyer, and what Judge Harry Edwards calls a ‘practical scholar.’ My work is deeply shaped by a career representing people ensnared in the criminal legal system — so being at a school where public service is central to its identity is really exciting and important to me.”

He also said the school’s stellar faculty was a big draw, along with the leadership of Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

“There’s great energy around the school, and the students obviously are some of the best in the country. They go on to do amazing work across so many different fields and sectors,” Harawa says.

“I feel really lucky to be a part of the community.”

Harawa will teach Evidence, Criminal Law, and Criminal Procedure. After running NYU Law’s Federal Appellate Clinic, he hopes to establish a practicum in that area at Berkeley Law. He says his research is deeply rooted in experience with clients and considering how to translate the insights of critical race theory into the day-to-day operations of the judicial system.

“I see recurring patterns and themes that point to deeper systemic issues, so I try to identify what practices — both in how policing, prosecution, and incarceration systems operate, and in how the law operates within those systems — produce these patterns, and what we might do to disrupt them,” he says. “I particularly focus on race because over the course of more than a decade of practice, I think all but four of my clients have been Black or Latino. That can’t be coincidental.”

Hall began in July, coming from the University of Minnesota’s history department. A legal historian of colonial America and the 19th-century United States, with a particular focus on entanglements of slavery, constitutionalism, and governance, he earned his J.D. at Harvard Law School and his Ph.D. in UC Berkeley’s history department.

His current book project, The Founding Rules: Slavery and the Creation of American Constitutionalism, 1789-1889, uncovers the deep roots of originalism by digging into the constitutionalism produced by struggles over slavery and state power in the early republic.

Hall says he could “compile a very long list of reasons why I am thrilled to come to Berkeley,” centered on the overlapping intellectual communities at the law school and the broader campus. He’s teaching a seminar on policy and power and a legal history survey course in the undergraduate Legal Studies Program this year.

“First, it is the opportunity of a lifetime to become a part of the law school’s storied Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, a singular institution for studying law and society together with creativity and rigor,” he says. “The program’s remarkable multidisciplinary faculty, scholarly vision, and teaching commitments resonate with how I approach legal history and with the kinds of advising and instruction that I am eager to pursue.

“More broadly, I cannot overstate my excitement about working among the law school’s deeply knowledgeable, curious, and collegial faculty. The wealth of expertise and spirit of inquiry at the law school are immediately, inspiringly evident.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw

Aneja, who joined Berkeley Law’s faculty in 2019, has quickly risen to star status in the law and economics realm. His work, which looks at how legal institutions affect economic and social inequality, has been published in top peer-reviewed journals, including the American Economic Review and the Review of Economics and Statistics.

“Abhay’s scholarship is impressive in its combination of methodological rigor and its willingness to explore big questions about the law,” says University of Chicago Law School Professor William H. J. Hubbard.

Professor Seth Davis was recently elected to the American Law Institute, joining 27 of his current or retired Berkeley Law colleagues in this prestigious group. Three alumni — Stanford Law School Professor Easha Anand ’14, University of Denver Sturm College of Law Professor Sam Kamin ’96, Ph.D. ’00, and Girard Sharp partner Sarah London ’09 — were also among the 49 new members.

A Berkeley Law faculty member since 2018 and faculty director of the school’s Center for Indigenous Law & Justice, Davis explores important questions of sovereignty, responsibility, and redress as they arise in public and private law, focusing on administrative law, the federal courts, federal Indian law, fiduciary law, and tort law.

A Harvard International Law Journal article co-authored by Professor Katerina Linos was one of two winners of the best article award given by the International Law and Social Science Interest Group of the American Society of International Law.

“The Limits and Promise of Global Antitrust Law,” written with Columbia Law School Professor Anu Bradford and University of Chicago Law School Dean Adam Chilton, reassesses long-held conventional wisdom about the relationship between countries’ antitrust laws and their economic growth. They point out that, on average, such laws have little to no effect on economic development — but improve growth in countries that adopted them without external incentives.

Co-director of the law school’s Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law, Linos does empirical research and focuses on developing and applying new qualitative and quantitative methods. She also hosts the “Borderlines” podcast.

Articles by legendary technology law Professors Pamela Samuelson and Robert P. Merges were selected as among the best intellectual property papers of 2025 and will be included in the next edition of the Intellectual Property Law Review.

Samuelson’s “Justification for Fair Uses,” published in the Wisconsin Law Review, explains the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith. She argues that the ruling preserved the standards for analyzing fair–use defenses that the Court laid out in its 1994 Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. decision.

Merges’ Berkeley Technology Law Journal article, “Lost Profits And Reasonable Royalties: Two Distinct Remedies For Two Separate Harms,” argues that the two types of damages described in the Patent Act — harm to product markets and lost licensing opportunity — describe distinct types of harm caused by patent infringement and come with a discrete cluster of remedies.

An article by Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon and Penn Law Professor Jill Fisch was recognized as one of the top 10 corporate and securities articles of 2025 by Corporate Practice Commentator, the ninth time Solomon’s solo or co-authored work has been chosen for this honor.

“Control and its Discontents,” published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, analyzes a recent series of Delaware court decisions that are skeptical of corporate action in controlled companies. Solomon and Fisch argue that the view of control which allows courts to closely scrutinize shareholder behavior “is both economically unnecessary and impractical,” and that Delaware courts should stick with existing market forces and structural safeguards.

The annual list of honored works, selected by teachers in corporate and securities law, drew from a pool of more than 440 articles. — Gwyneth K. Shaw