In Brief

Two of our renowned research and policy centers recently welcomed new leaders with big shoes to fill and ambitious plans to match.

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.

Patel, who worked in the Office of Management and Budget during the Obama administration before law school, sees BCLB as a strong platform to tackle some of society’s most pressing issues.

“I’m driven to figure out how to realign incentives of our economy that lead to positive outcomes,” she says. “BCLB is well-positioned to bring together powerful, influential people to talk about how to do that.”

Patel replaces Adam Sterling ’13, now assistant dean for executive education and revenue generation, who took over BCLB in 2015 and greatly expanded its programming.

“Thanks to her incredible background — as a White House administrator, ESG attorney, and instructor at Berkeley Law — Angeli is the perfect leader to take our program, and business law, into the future,” Sterling says.

Popken has worked on United Nations–mediated peace and ceasefire negotiations in Sudan, Syria, and Yemen through the Public International Law & Policy Group, and led that organization’s Istanbul office. She’s also taught negotiations at Stanford Law School and worked for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Pacific Council on International Policy.

“HRC’s leadership and expertise in human rights and technology excites me,” says Popken, a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. “We have such a knowledgeable and passionate team that I’m inspired to work with.”

Koenig, who will become co-faculty director with Eric Stover, says they’re thrilled with Popken’s hire.

“Betsy’s breadth of experience and diverse perspectives on human rights is truly stunning, ranging from frontline to government to legal practice,” Koenig says. “She’s an ideal person to lead our multidisciplinary team into its next decade.”
— Gwyneth K. Shaw

Just a few weeks before graduating, Nicole Conrad ’22 and Joya Manjur ’22 stepped before a panel of U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judges to argue against the U.S. Department of Justice. The asylum petition of El Salvadoran Oscar Gonzalez-Castillo hung in the balance.

In Berkeley Law’s Ninth Circuit Practicum, students craft and argue cases under attorney supervision — in this instance, from Amalia Wille ’13 and Judah Lakin ’15.

Months later, the panel issued an opinion that closely followed their arguments and broke new ground, expanding the circuit’s ability to grant asylum for many others who were previously barred.

“We had spent a year thinking and writing about how our client deserved justice,” Conrad says. “It was gratifying to see that come to fruition.”

Gonzalez-Castillo left El Salvador in 2014 for the U.S. after police accused him of being part of an infamous gang. In 2020, after the U.S. government moved to deport him, he applied for asylum and relief under the Convention Against Torture.

At his hearing, the government introduced a “Red Notice” alleging his gang involvement during a 2015 incident. The immigration judge denied Gonzalez-Castillo all requested relief, citing the Red Notice as evidence of a serious crime.

Among the notice’s many flaws that the students highlighted in court: Gonzalez-Castillo was in the U.S. when the incident happened. Manjur notes that the notices, used increasingly by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in asylum cases, are abused by corrupt governments.

“Having the chance to clarify what Red Notices actually are and help develop the law around them in the Ninth Circuit was really exciting,” she says.

Gonzalez-Castillo’s case was returned to the Board of Immigration Appeals for further review. Hoping to expedite his removal from detention, Conrad and Manjur are pushing to use the Ninth Circuit’s decision to support a request for Interpol to rescind his Red Notice. — Gwyneth K. Shaw

New improvements to Berkeley Law’s already strong Loan Repayment Assistance Program (LRAP) provided welcome but hardly surprising news to Atteeyah Hollie ’10.

“Berkeley not only talks the talk of wanting students to be social transformers, it walks the walk by ensuring they can dedicate their lives to it,” says Hollie, deputy director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. “I’m a prime example.”

The program’s income cap rose from $100,000 to $120,000, enabling more public interest graduates to obtain this support. Also, the out-of-pocket contribution decreased from 35% of a participant’s income over $80,000 to 25% — meaning grads will receive more funding and spend less of their own money on student loan expenses.

“Over the past few years, we’ve made a number of improvements to this program,” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says. “This is our most impactful policy change yet.”

Anyone in law-related, public interest employment can qualify, participants are able to enter and exit the program at will, and the school maximizes support by not considering assets, allowing for dependent deductions, and protecting a portion of side job income.

Director of Public Interest Financial Support Amanda Prasuhn calls Berkeley Law’s LRAP “assuredly the best of any public law school” with “one of the lowest out-of-pocket contribution formulas of any institution.”

The improvements reflect a far-reaching commitment to help serve students and the public interest (see infographic).

“LRAP literally paid for my law school and undergraduate loans for 10-plus years,” Hollie says. “And now that they’ve been completely forgiven, I have many more years fighting for transformations in our criminal legal system to look forward to. Without LRAP, I’m not sure I could have lasted this long doing the work I love.”
— Andrew Cohen

Other courses being taught at Berkeley Law for the first time this semester:

• Angel Island – Legal Histories of Imprisonment
• Anti-Discrimination Policies in Insurance Law
• Asylum Law Seminar and Practicum
• Designing Government Services
• Human Rights Practice Workshop
• Introduction to Supreme Court for 1Ls
• Litigating Class Actions
• Pathways to Carbon Neutrality
• Preparing to Practice Patent Law
• Special Topics in Education Policy: Race, Gender, and Sexuality
• Strategy: Theory, Law and Policy
• The Killing of Jamal Khashoggi and the Search for Justice
• The Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Case
• Women’s Leadership in the Law

Artificial intelligence — using machines to mimic outputs of the human mind — is part of our everyday lives. Alexa and Siri help us with tasks and anticipate our choices; chat bots assist with everything from customer service to health care.

This burgeoning technology, however, has hype and fear competing for the dominant public narrative. As AI spreads, two University of California powerhouses are teaming up to examine how to promote responsible innovation: Our Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT) and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute’s CITRIS Policy Lab, which draws expertise from several UC campuses.

The Artificial Intelligence, Platforms, and Society Project, co-led by CITRIS Policy Lab Director and Goldman School of Public Policy Associate Research Professor Brandie Nonnecke and Berkeley Law Professor Tejas N. Narechania, also works closely with various researchers from Berkeley’s information and engineering schools. A timely forum for students, academics, practitioners, and tech companies that supports research, training, and a fellowship program, the project focuses on general AI governance, usage, and how new tools can ethically address pressing problems in law.

“We cannot, as a nation, control any AI technology from being developed. We just can’t,” says BCLT Executive Director Wayne Stacy. “So it really comes down to regulations, implementation, and the ability to follow those regulations.”

Complementing and broadening the reach of BCLT’s Asia IP & Technology Law Project and its Life Sciences Project, this new initiative will also feed the center’s fast-growing online B-CLE platform for Continuing Legal Education credits.

How should we regulate speech on platforms with significant market power, address discrimination by machine-learning-based algorithms, and balance the individual privacy interests in information against the collective benefits gained from aggregated data?

“It’s really important that we get a handle on the governance questions ahead of time, and start to think about how we’re going to answer them,” Narechania says. — Gwyneth K. Shaw

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is co-leading a major UC Berkeley initiative to combat online harms. “Our Better Web” examines the prevalence of content promoting deception, discrimination, and child exploitation, and assesses laws pertaining to internet material and online platforms’ content moderation strategies.

Chemerinsky heads the project with former U.S. Secretary for Homeland Security Janet Napolitano (who now directs UC Berkeley’s Center for Security in Politics), Graduate School of Journalism Dean Geeta Anand, and three leading campus authorities in data science, digital forensics, and information technology. Some key features of the initiative:

• Enlists top experts in various internet-related disciplines
• Aims to help influence policymaking and legislation to protect children online, boost privacy protections, stop the spread of illegal content, and mitigate online hate that has fueled violence based on race, gender, and sexual orientation
• First project focused on Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which largely protects online platforms from liabilities associated with user-generated content (published a report on the law’s effects, suggested various reforms, and created a public database of all Section 230-related federal legislation)
• Probing how best to neutralize deepfakes, which use artificial intelligence to create seemingly real but deeply deceptive videos of public figures and others
• Launching multidisciplinary research projects, public events, and trainings on effective technology and policy strategies

California Department of Financial Protection Commissioner Cloey Hewlett ’79: Interviewed by Berkeley Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice Executive Director Ted Mermin ’96, Hewlett discussed guiding the regulation of banks, mortgage lending, debt collectors, cryptocurrency, and more. Having grown up in poverty, she told students: “It’s OK to challenge yourself. It’s in the challenge that you’ll find your mission.”
— Andrew Cohen

It sounds like the start of a joke: A guy walks into a bar and meets a man who’s made more than 25,000 ceramic mugs …

But 2L Mark Mabry’s chance encounter with Ehren Tool led to a seriously gratifying and cathartic event for the members of two Berkeley Law student organizations for active military and veterans. Just weeks before randomly meeting Tool at a local watering hole, Mabry’s girlfriend had sent an article about his work connecting veterans through art.

For over two decades, Tool has helped fellow vets create and design mugs that resonate with their military experience. The senior lab mechanician for ceramics at UC Berkeley’s Art Department, he has shown his work across the United States and Europe.

“We introduced ourselves and Ehren immediately offered to put on a ceramics event for the law school’s veterans,” says Mabry, a former Marine who co-leads Military Veterans at Berkeley Law (MVBL). “He did a great job and everyone had a blast.”

Students in MVBL and the group Legal Obstacles Veterans Encounter attended with alumni veterans and friends. The mugs were displayed before the Cal-Stanford football game through Platform, a UC Berkeley Art Department initiative featuring collaborative projects and pop-up exhibitions.

Reflecting camaraderie, discipline, commitment, and more, the mugs — some more playful, others more solemn — align with the diversity of the veterans’ experiences.

“The cups become a place to speak about unspeakable things,” Tool says. “I just make cups. The vets, their families, and their stories make them something more.” — Andrew Cohen

It sounds like the start of a joke: A guy walks into a bar and meets a man who’s made more than 25,000 ceramic mugs …

But 2L Mark Mabry’s chance encounter with Ehren Tool led to a seriously gratifying and cathartic event for the members of two Berkeley Law student organizations for active military and veterans. Just weeks before randomly meeting Tool at a local watering hole, Mabry’s girlfriend had sent an article about his work connecting veterans through art.

For over two decades, Tool has helped fellow vets create and design mugs that resonate with their military experience. The senior lab mechanician for ceramics at UC Berkeley’s Art Department, he has shown his work across the United States and Europe.

“We introduced ourselves and Ehren immediately offered to put on a ceramics event for the law school’s veterans,” says Mabry, a former Marine who co-leads Military Veterans at Berkeley Law (MVBL). “He did a great job and everyone had a blast.”

Students in MVBL and the group Legal Obstacles Veterans Encounter attended with alumni veterans and friends. The mugs were displayed before the Cal-Stanford football game through Platform, a UC Berkeley Art Department initiative featuring collaborative projects and pop-up exhibitions.

Reflecting camaraderie, discipline, commitment, and more, the mugs — some more playful, others more solemn — align with the diversity of the veterans’ experiences.

“The cups become a place to speak about unspeakable things,” Tool says. “I just make cups. The vets, their families, and their stories make them something more.” — Andrew Cohen

Two alums made area history in the 2022 November election.

Pamela Price ’82 was elected as Alameda County’s first Black district attorney in the position’s 170-year history. She vowed to work to reduce gun violence, end mass incarceration, and root out racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities within the county’s criminal legal system.

The first person in nearly a century to assume the job without having worked in the county DA’s Office, Price was a longtime civil rights lawyer who started her own firm in Oakland in 1991. She represented victims of retaliation, wrongful termination, sexual assaults, and discrimination based on sex, age, religion, disability, and race. A survivor of the Ohio juvenile justice and foster care systems, Price was emancipated at age 16.

Janani Ramachandran ’20 is Oakland’s new City Council member for District 4 — the youngest person ever elected to the council and its first South Asian. Her campaign called for improvements in responsive leadership, public and fire safety, clean streets and flourishing parks, reduced homelessness, affordable housing, and thriving small businesses.

A member of the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs, Ramachandran has been an attorney at legal nonprofits and on the boards of violence prevention nonprofits across Oakland. — Andrew Cohen

Pro Bono Program Director Deborah Schlosberg won an Emerging Leader Award from the Association of American Law Schools.

A recent Berkeley Law Library project sought to confront bias and advance inclusion within its storied stacks: Reclassifying books, periodicals, and other materials about America’s Indigenous people to their own place on the shelves.

Cataloger Kate Peck was inspired by an American Association of Law Libraries presentation last summer, which stemmed from the Library of Congress expanding the classification system for Indigenous materials within the class for law materials in 2014.

The original 1969 schema had just 28 call numbers for all works involving Indigenous law, pushed to a tiny space at the bottom of the main category — treatment criticized by some catalogers as “ghettoization” and echoing the societal exclusion and erasure of tribal nations and sovereignty issues. By comparison, Peck says there were 148 call numbers for federal income tax law and 90 for laws involving the U.S. Postal Service.

The project’s motivation is “treating Indigenous materials with the respect they deserve,” she says. “Reclassifying our Indigenous law materials allows them to exist in their own context, acknowledging the sovereignty and independence of people who have been marginalized and isolated for too long.”

Peck and fellow catalogers Irina Migal, Shelly McLaughlin, and Enedina Vera found about 860 physical items that met the review criteria, examined each title’s catalog entry, and decided whether to keep it in its existing classification or move it to a new one.

“We reclassify or reorganize materials for a variety of reasons,” Law Library Director Marci Hoffman says. “To make like materials easier to locate, to organize materials based on a more logical system, or to better address political, social, and economic realities in society.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw