Seven Up: The New Faculty Chairs

even Berkeley Law professors were recently awarded faculty chairs, recognizing their contributions to scholarship and legal education.

“A chaired position is the highest honor a university can bestow on a faculty member,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says. “These professors embody the very best of academia and of Berkeley Law: They are terrific teachers, superb scholars, and wonderful colleagues.”

The professors — Abbye Atkinson, Laurel E. Fletcher, Orin Kerr, Katerina Linos, Jeffrey Selbin, Elisabeth Semel, and Steven Davidoff Solomon — reflect the faculty’s depth and breadth. With expertise ranging from international law and human rights to the intricacies and pitfalls of corporate and consumer law, their impact is felt across the academic and policy landscape, from top law reviews to the halls of power in Washington, D.C., Sacramento, and beyond.

Semel, Selbin, and Fletcher — directors of the Death Penalty Clinic, Policy Advocacy Clinic, and International Human Rights Law Clinic, respectively — are Berkeley Law’s first clinical faculty to receive chairs. The honor is part of a larger effort to guarantee clinical and teaching faculty a similar level of the employment security enjoyed by their tenure-track colleagues, and to recognize their influence on students, the school, and the outside world.

“I think it signals that the university values the special contributions of our law school clinics to the teaching, service, and research mission of Berkeley,” Selbin says.

Linos focuses on international employment and migration law. She is co-faculty director of the school’s Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law and host of the new “Borderlines” podcast, which explores global problems in a world fragmented by national borders.

Atkinson studies how credit and debt operate in marginalized communities, with an emphasis on the imbalance between obligation and opportunity that credit and debt represent. She teaches Contracts, Poverty Law, and a seminar on Debt, Discrimination, and Inequality.

Solomon is one of the nation’s most prominent corporate law experts, and his articles consistently make Corporate Practice Commentator’s annual poll of the field’s best papers. He’s also been a regular New York Times contributor on corporate law trends, and is a faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business.

Kerr, a renowned scholar of computer crime, criminal procedure, and criminal law, was voted the nation’s fifth most-influential law professor and ranked the second most-cited legal academic born after 1970. He has more than 100,000 Twitter followers and is a faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.

“It is such a privilege to be on this faculty,” Atkinson says. “I learn so much each day from my colleagues and from our students. Berkeley Law is a special place in which to exist, so to receive this chair on top of just getting to be and grow here every day feels like an embarrassment of riches.”

— Gwyneth K. Shaw