Table of Contents

Picture This:
Photo Essay
A visual tour celebrating bar exam success, student life, small mods, and our Brains of Berkeley Law series.

Early-Career Excellence
Berkeley Law’s powerhouse junior faculty are making a major scholarly impact across many legal fields.

Forefront
Leadership in Research, Service, & Education
Confronting the lack of diversity in clerkships • Five students scale international law summit • Standout lecturers elevate our classrooms • Practicum students help deported veterans • Field Placement Program shines worldwide • Taking our water policy work national

Fast Forward
Powerful Student Action Figures

Study Hall
Selected Faculty Scholarship

Advancement
Updates from Development & Alumni Relations

Class Notes
All in the Alumni Family

Ultimately, the quality of any educational institution is largely a reflection of its faculty. I am enormously proud of the fact that since 2017, we have hired over two dozen terrific professors. These faculty additions teach and write about every area of law. Each turned down other offers to join us. They bring energy, ideas, and expertise. They are great scholars and great teachers.

Our strategy emphasizes the importance of hiring faculty at all stages of experience. Some professors who joined us were tenured at other law schools and the leading stars in their fields. But we also stress hiring those starting their teaching careers. Berkeley Law has a history of hiring excellent new educators and of wonderful success in helping them become superb teachers and scholars.

I hope you enjoy reading about this large group of “junior” faculty. By every measure, they are outstanding and truly are the future of Berkeley Law.

Berkeley Center for Law and Business (BCLB) Executive Director Angeli Patel ’20 is a familiar face: As a student and since graduation, she’s worked closely with the center, particularly in the growing sphere of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) guidance for corporations.

At the Human Rights Center (HRC), Betsy Popken joins longtime leader Alexa Koenig ’13 as co-executive director. Popken previously co-founded and co-led Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe’s business and human rights practice, and also helped launch its ESG practice.

The federal clerkship hiring process is famously high stress and opaque — and a near-certain career-maker for those who nab a coveted spot.

But the demographics of these clerks lag even the composition of law school cohorts, despite years of good intentions and earnest effort. Informal studies show the ranks are dominated by white men who went to top law schools, particularly Yale and Harvard.

Researchers from the Berkeley Judicial Institute (BJI) set out to understand why the mix has been so difficult to change. In a groundbreaking study featuring interviews with 50 federal judges, they teased out some trends and potential new practices for hiring — and found that “diversity” doesn’t mean the same thing to every judge.

Every year, the American Society of International Law receives abundant submissions for its annual research conference. Predictably, those selected are almost always faculty scholars.

But Berkeley Law recently flipped the script with five current or recent students chosen to discuss their work: Anthony Ghaly ’23, Helena von Nagy ’22, Simone Lieban Levine ’21, and Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program Ph.D. students Haley Anderson and Daimeon Shanks.

“It was so impressive to have so many of our students present,” says Professor Katerina Linos. “It represents the cumulative efforts of many Berkeley Law faculty over the years.”

Olga V. Mack’s Blockchain for Lawyers course started as an intimate one-credit seminar.

But months before it was even scheduled to start this semester, Berkeley Law students were lobbying her to increase enrollment — to a whopping 85 slots. The course is now less hands-on, but Mack appreciates that her pupils share her excitement about the technology.

“I love this tech because it’s powerful and will transform our work and lives in our lifetime,” she says. “So, I’ve been on a mission to educate students and the public.”

Since 2009, students in Berkeley Law’s Veteran’s Law Practicum have helped former service members solve an array of problems.

Now, they’re tackling a new issue: The deportation of veterans after criminal convictions, often stemming from mental health conditions related to their military service. Hundreds of former service members have been sent to Mexico, with many others now in Jamaica, various countries in Africa, and elsewhere across the globe.

Lecturer and practicum leader Rose Carmen Goldberg, who supervises students working with an alliance of legal aid organizations, immigration law experts, a former judge, and affected veterans, calls it “an under- recognized and long unaddressed injustice.” She adds, “First, they face incarceration. Then, they face the second punishment of exile. These veterans deserve mental health care and support — not banishment and separation from their families.”

Kenya is nearly 10,000 miles from campus, but 3L Brock Williams found a purpose there that hit close to home.

One of a record 228 students in Berkeley Law’s Field Placement Program this school year, Williams worked with the United Nations Environment Program Law Division in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.

“The United Nations and what it aspires to has long inspired me,” he says. “I was excited to work with this organization, especially on some environmental agreements I’d only learned about in class.”

California’s tremendous thirst for water poses a grave challenge to its future, from an everyday perspective and the longer battle of combating climate change — and is a bellwether for the rest of America. A team led by our Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) recently won a $2 million grant from the United States Environmental Protection Agency to take its longstanding work on water policy national, guiding efforts to recharge aquifers and improve groundwater sustainability.

The ground beneath our feet holds a significant portion of the Earth’s water, and is a critical source for people worldwide. California and other states where water is scarce have long tapped more groundwater — particularly for agriculture — than goes back in through the natural recharge process, in which water from rivers, lakes, streams, and rain flows into the ground.

Groundwater deficits have other implications, too: When the pores in the rocks, gravel, and soil we walk on are empty, it can degrade water quality and even cause the earth’s surface to sink. This damage can be permanent, making aquifers unsuitable for groundwater storage and compounding the problem.

Founded in 2001, the clinic helps people facing execution. Along the way, under the deft leadership of Professors Elisabeth Semel and Ty Alper and Supervising Attorney Mridula Raman, students reap abundant and often transformational opportunities for hands-on experience.

The backbone of a professor’s tenure case is their scholarship. But teaching is also a major component, and highly valued at Berkeley Law.

For years, Berkeley Law’s untenured faculty have found an intellectual haven in a regular meeting with a distinctive name: the Junior Working Ideas Group, affectionately known as J-WIG.

Across numerous fields, many of Berkeley Law’s junior faculty have used their scholarly work to probe the causes and results of inequality in our society, bolstering the school’s public mission–oriented reputation.