rofessor Tejas N. Narechania remembers when he first came to Berkeley Law as a brand-new hire. The stellar reputations of three of the school’s intellectual property scholars — Professors Pamela Samuelson, Peter S. Menell, and Robert Merges, whose work he knew well — made him more than a little nervous to be stepping into the same arena.

“Pam, Peter, and Rob are titans of the IP field. They’re largely responsible for creating the field, and a huge part of the reason I decided to come here was to learn from them,” Narechania says. “But I was definitely intimidated. It’s a part of the early faculty experience, I think — to be awed by the most prominent people in your field. But then you go talk to them, and remember that they’re humans.”

Academia, particularly in the early, pre-tenure years, has a pressure-cooker reputation. New professors are mastering high-level teaching while simultaneously juggling a research agenda that’s essential to their success, all under the watchful eyes of students and their tenured colleagues. Their performance over a set period of time dramatically impacts the trajectory of their careers, as the tick-tock of the tenure clock looms over the seasonal rhythms of the law school.

But Narechania, who joined the faculty in 2016, says the culture among Berkeley Law’s “junior” professors has made the journey far smoother.

“It’s a testament to not only our really supportive community, as it exists today, but a legacy and tradition of building that for junior scholars, going back many years,” he says.

Professor Abbye Atkinson, who was hired the same year as Narechania, agrees.

“I have been nurtured as a scholar at Berkeley,” she says. “There is a norm of honest and supportive academic engagement that has been crucial to my development as a scholar.”

The Junior Working Ideas Group [see Group Dynamics below], which functions as an informal but regular way for untenured faculty to discuss their scholarship, is “a really special place,” Atkinson says. She calls it “a place to bring your honest self to get insightful feedback on the earliest ideas to a full draft of work, and to share the challenges and precarity of life as a junior.”

“Special” is the word that many of the school’s junior professors use to describe their experience, both with one another and with the rest of the faculty, students, and staff.

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

Junior faculty say their colleagues, and the school’s administration, are extremely supportive and helpful when it comes to their courses.

“People are very happy to share materials, to talk about approaches to a class and how to deal with difficult or tricky cases,” Professor Tejas N. Narechania says. “And there’s no one way to do it — some people lecture, some people use the Socratic method, but everyone’s comfortable with you doing what makes the most sense for you.”

He says he has benefited greatly from formal and informal discussions about pedagogy, and also been encouraged to craft his own courses.

Professor David Hausman taught Civil Procedure last fall, and says he was heartened both by his colleagues’ valuable assistance and the way the students welcomed him.

“The very best thing about Berkeley Law is the students,” he says. “I just love the way I’m learning from them as well.”

For Professor Manisha Padi, who was trained as an economist and also has a J.D., it’s been challenging but fun to strike the balance between the disciplines with students.

“I’ve loved teaching Berkeley Law students,” she says. “They are incredibly passionate and willing to question the status quo.”

Students are equally enthusiastic about learning from these newer professors. Spencer Perry ’23, who took Professor Rebecca Wexler’s Evidence course in fall 2021 and her Secrecy: The Use and Abuse of Information Control in the Courts course the following spring, says she “changed my life” and gave him a model he hopes to emulate in his own career. He lauded her expertise, empathy, and dedication to advocating on students’ behalf.

“She meets and exceeds the qualities that define the Berkeley Law faculty: She is brilliant, evocative, and engaged,” Perry says. “Professor Wexler infused her research and practical experience reckoning constitutional guardrails with emerging technologies. She supports each of her students with a personal, thoughtful touch.”

Professor Emily Rong Zhang says she already misses her fall Civil Procedure students, and that she’s also grateful for the generosity of her fellow teachers.

“There is such an incredible transformation that happens to first-semester 1Ls, and it’s wonderful to be able to be a part of and witness that process,” Zhang says. — Gwyneth K. Shaw

Starting out in the academy with such a wonderful cohort of colleagues has made a big difference, Professor Rebecca Wexler says. She came to Berkeley Law in 2019 along with Professors Jonathan S. Gould, Rebecca Goldstein, Manisha Padi, and Abhay Aneja.

“There’s so much to learn about being a new prof, independent of one’s scholarly field, and just having those peers there to share experiences and perspectives is really fun,” Wexler says. “It’s also great to have the chance to learn scholarship from another field or explain your scholarship to someone in another field. It helps one sharpen ideas.”

Professor David Hausman, who arrived on campus last summer, says he’s leaned on his junior colleagues for everything from hacks for finding his way among the school’s labyrinthine halls to advice on how to solve a tricky empirical problem.

“They help with every small thing that you’re wondering about, from where to find office supplies to how to think about your committee assignments,” he says. “And then there’s the academic side — if you have a question about your standard errors, it’s like having an arm of the economics department right down the hall. If you want to think about the theoretical implications of what you’re doing, there are just as many people you can talk to.”

Hausman and many of the others also laud Berkeley Law’s senior faculty for their welcoming and helpful manner.

Professor Andrew C. Baker, hired alongside Hausman and Professor Emily Rong Zhang last year, says his experience has exceeded his already high expectations. Despite his short tenure, he quickly felt accepted and integrated into the law school community.

“I’ve already had such helpful senior mentorship,” Baker says. “During my first couple months here, I was invited to countless lunches and coffee meetings with people well outside my area to talk about settling in and life as a young professor, which has been amazing.

“I’ve also had the immense pleasure to get to know the illustrious Dick Buxbaum well, who is just a few offices down from me and the archetypal example of how to be an amazing professor and thoughtful human.”

Narechania echoes those sentiments. Despite their own hectic schedules — teaching and helping to shape the IP world, both inside the academy and in the courts and policy realms — Menell, Samuelson, and Merges have consistently offered assistance and support, even as he’s forged his own path in the IP canon.

“They were always very eager to read drafts of my work,” Narechania says. “They didn’t always agree, and they would tell me when they didn’t agree. But that’s part of being a scholar, and an important part of my experience has been to learn from them, but also to learn how to be a scholar in community with them.

“You’re being encouraged to become the scholar you want to be, which I think is a unique and special quality of Berkeley Law.”

or 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.

It’s a place to catch up with colleagues, share ideas, and workshop scholarship in progress, in a low-key space where creativity and risk-taking are highly encouraged. The sessions are so validating that some faculty who have graduated to the tenured “senior” faculty meetings still talk wistfully of the experience.

“It offers a strong and tight-knit academic and social community for junior scholars to find their way in the world with mutual support and a home-team cheering squad,” says Professor Emily Rong Zhang, who’s in her first year at the school. “We’re lucky there’s institutional support for the junior community. We get to trade advice, tips, and — when necessary — sympathy over Gregoire’s fabulous sandwiches and famous potato puffs on a weekly basis.”

Professor David Hausman, also a newcomer, says he knew he’d enjoy the formal workshops, with presentations of current research. But he finds the less structured conversations just as valuable.

“That’s the part of it I wasn’t anticipating: That relatively often, we don’t discuss a paper but instead just chat with each other about our work,” he says. “That informality is so helpful, to be able to run something by my junior colleagues without having to present something that’s fully formed.”

Professor Tejas N. Narechania vividly remembers J-WIG, which includes assistant clinical professors Stephanie Campos-
Bui ’14 and Erik Stallman ’03, during his first year. Several members were close to going up for tenure, and he admired and respected them greatly. Now that he’s in the same position, he says he’s trying to be as generous and supportive to his younger colleagues as they were to him.

“I think it’s easy to look at everybody else’s accomplishments and think that they’re all doing so much and I’m not doing enough — to feel a little bit of that impostor syndrome,” Narechania says. “Part of my own journey has been coming to the understanding that if you just keep doing the work, especially in a job like this that you love, you’ll gain the experience and the knowledge that you need to be successful. And I’m trying to pass that down.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw

The culture of encouraging junior faculty has paid hefty research and policy dividends, too.

Atkinson has blazed a trail exploring how debt — especially high-cost borrowing, such as payday loans — can further marginalize and impoverish already poor people and communities. She’s testified before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, and won the American Constitution Society’s inaugural Ruth Bader Ginsburg Scholar Award last year.

Gould, whose studies of the relationship between politics and law drew particular interest during Senate filibuster battles and then-President Trump’s impeachment, won the Association of American Law Schools’ 2020 Scholarly Papers Prize for work by a faculty member in their first five years of teaching law for “Law Within Congress.”

His research on progressive constitutionalism, legislative representation, constitutional norms, legislative procedure, and the politics of regulation has been published in over a half-dozen top law journals, including the Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal.

“Some of my closest friends in Berkeley are fellow junior faculty members, and I’ve also been very lucky to get to know our wonderful dean and senior faculty members at Berkeley Law and across the university,” Gould says. “Add in terrific students and a vibrant school culture, and this is a special place to be.”

Wexler’s work on data, technology, and criminal justice has caught the attention of policymakers at the state and federal level. She’s currently senior policy advisor for science and justice at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and has also worked with U.S. Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat, on legislation to help rebalance a system that frequently bars criminal defendants from subpoenaing online communication content — even when it could exonerate them.

Her Harvard Law Review paper exposing some of those issues, “Privacy as Privilege,” also earned her the 2020 Reidenberg-Kerr Award.

Narechania, too, has seen his academic work used in real-world applications. He examines questions of technology, law, and policy from an institutional perspective, an interest seeded during his time as a clerk for then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and a stint at the Federal Communications Commission. Narechania has written extensively about telecommunications, particularly access to broadband internet service.

His 2021 Berkeley Technology Law Journal article “Convergence and a Case for Broadband Rate Regulation,” which showed that customers served by monopoly providers — roughly 20% of the country — pay more for worse service than those in a competitive market, was cited by a White House executive order aimed at promoting greater economic competition.

Narechania, like Wexler a faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, recently became the co-leader of the Artificial Intelligence, Platforms, and Society Project [see page 6]. The new initiative will work with students, academics, practitioners, and technology companies to explore the best ways to support responsible development and use of artificial intelligence.

Those are just a few examples. Goldstein, Aneja, Padi, Baker, Hausman, Zhang, and Professor Asad Rahim have also scored placements in top law reviews and peer-reviewed journals, including work expressly focused on using the law to analyze and combat inequality [see “Spotlighting Inequality” below].

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says he’s “tremendously proud” of the faculty the school has recruited in recent years, including those who have begun their teaching careers here. Since 2017, Berkeley Law has hired 29 new professors.

“Our ‘junior’ faculty are spectacular. They have distinguished themselves as wonderful classroom teachers and as prolific and influential scholars,” he says. “In many ways, these faculty are the future of Berkeley Law and it is a future that could not look brighter or better.”

That flurry of hiring has helped make an appealing place even more desirable, says Aneja, an economist who studies how legal institutions affect economic and social inequality.

“What I think sets Berkeley apart from our peers is being very active on the rookie market every year,” he says. “Robust junior hiring has helped me in a few ways: First, I have many peers who can teach me about norms in the profession. Second, I get to see a lot of very bright junior scholars present their best work to my colleagues; this has taught me a great deal about legal scholarship and what constitutes good research.”

The group includes a number of empiricists like Aneja. He, Padi, Goldstein, Rahim, Hausman, Zhang, Baker, and Gould all hold a Ph.D., reflecting the larger trend in legal academia of scholars adding intensive social science training to their law degree. That expertise also mirrors a large slice of the senior faculty — particularly those working in the Ph.D.-granting Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program — and complements and augments the school’s historically strong cohort of law and economics scholars.

“It’s been a huge pleasure to be around a lot of like-minded scholars who come at similar questions from different directions with varying methodologies,” Padi says. “The faculty is very generous, providing guidance on research as well as forming a community that I can rely on during this early stage in my career.”

Wexler says the bottom line is simple: This is a great place to be.

“I love being a junior faculty member at Berkeley Law,” she says. “My interactions with my colleagues — junior and senior — invariably leave me energized and inspired to dive into scholarship, teaching, and service.”

cross 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.

Their toolboxes vary: Professor Abbye Atkinson’s perspective on consumer credit and the widening racial and gender gap is influenced by her expertise as a Contracts teacher. Professor Rebecca Wexler is focused on evidence and privacy and their intersection in the criminal justice system. Professors Abhay Aneja, Manisha Padi, Rebecca Goldstein, Emily Rong Zhang, and David Hausman leverage empirical methods for their analysis. Professor Asad Rahim draws from constitutional law and critical race theory.

But regardless of their approach, each is finding places where the law — past, present, and potentially future — has caused or exacerbated unfairness, often among race and class lines.

“Inequality is particularly important to study because fair and equitable laws must serve all types of people,” says Padi, who studies the law and economics of consumer financial contracts. “It’s a field that allows scholars from a variety of backgrounds to focus on the fields that interest them and resonate with their life experience.”

Aneja, who like Padi holds a Ph.D. in economics, looks at how legal institutions affect economic and social inequality. His research includes an exploration of the cost of employment segregation, using President Woodrow Wilson’s move to separate the civil service corps and how that decision affected white and Black workers’ incomes in the ensuing decades, and an analysis of the glaring racial gap in campaign contributions.

“My interest in this area is probably due to a combination of being the child of immigrants and growing up in the South, a region with a complicated history of racial subjugation,” he says. “Since college, I’ve had an ongoing interest in understanding how institutions create opportunities for shared prosperity in multiethnic democracies like ours.”

Atkinson’s trailblazing scholarship includes addressing how Congress has encouraged debt among socioeconomically marginalized groups — and how that debt burden causes wealth to flow out of disadvantaged communities. Her research is already nationally known, says Berkeley Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice Executive Director Ted Mermin ’96, who’s worked closely with Atkinson, including teaching the Consumer Law and Economic Justice Workshop with her last spring.

He says her work “serves as a guiding light for her colleagues around the country and, as I can personally attest, inside the law school.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw