Powerhouse Professors

When Ginsburg asked his undergraduate advisers for help, they all said there was one person to talk to: Berkeley Law Professor Martin Shapiro.

“So I got in touch with him and sent him to Mongolia, and I got very interested in constitution-making through that process,” Ginsburg says. “After a couple years of working on this, I realized these were really interesting questions: Where does constitutional democracy come from? How is it sustained, and how does it die?

“These questions are what led me back to graduate school, and they’re what has motivated my work.”

Ginsburg earned a J.D. from Berkeley Law and a Ph.D. from its Jurisprudence & Social Policy (JSP) Program, turning down other schools so he could work with Shapiro, who became his dissertation adviser.

“The JSP Program was amazing, because you had access to not just people in the law school but from all over campus,” he says. “I was like a kid in a candy store. And having people with Ph.D.s but were teaching in a law school as mentors was really great, because they could advise you on the process of academia, both in law and in other disciplines.”

Now a renowned University of Chicago law and political science professor, Ginsburg has made a stellar academic career out of studying democracies — and building new constitutions internationally. The author of five books and dozens of articles, he’s just one of more than 100 Berkeley Law–educated professors at law schools and universities around the world.

Legal academia is famously stacked with graduates of Yale and Harvard. But between the law school’s J.D., Master of Laws (LL.M.), and Doctor of Juridical Science (J.S.D.) programs and JSP, Berkeley Law also offers a well-supported path to becoming a professor.

“Our alumni are making their mark across wide swaths of academia,” says Professor Dylan Penningroth, associate dean for the JSP and Legal Studies programs. “We have a long track record of placing our graduates not just in law schools, but in other top departments as well.”

The school’s own faculty is a testament to that success: Fifteen professors have Berkeley Law degrees, as do several emeritus faculty and many research center directors, legal writing teachers, fellows, and staff.

“What makes the JSP program incomparable is that it brings together these topically, disciplinarily, and methodologically diverse faculty members — who then truly want to be in conversation with each other and with you,” says Berkeley Law Professor Diana Reddy, who joined the faculty last fall after finishing her JSP Ph.D. “As a graduate student, I had the most incredible committee, and to now have many of those same people as my colleagues is a dream come true.

“Also, Berkeley Law students are amazing: intellectually curious, concerned with social problems, and earnest in trying to figure out how to be part of the solution. As a professor, how could you ask for anything more?”

Given her interests, Rowen knew a law degree would be helpful — but she wasn’t very interested in practicing law. Meeting a JSP student at the end of her undergraduate program unlocked a whole new idea: She could keep learning at a law school with no intention of becoming a lawyer.

“I didn’t understand academia, I didn’t know about disciplines and jobs, I had no idea what I was doing and what it would take to become a professor,” she says. “I was just interested in my topic, and this seemed like a place where I could study that.”

Rowen felt supported and intellectually inspired by her JSP mentors, particularly clinical faculty from the International Human Rights Law Clinic and the East Bay Community Law Center and the late Professor Lauren Edelman ’86, a program stalwart and sociologist who blazed a trail for socio-legal scholars. It’s a label Rowen now applies to herself, as a professor of political science and legal studies and director of the UMass Center for Justice, Law, and Societies.

“In non-law school jobs, there are just a few openings a year, and I got really lucky to get the right job for me,” she says. “This is the oldest legal studies program in the country, and I knew that this program would understand, through and through, that I’m a socio-legal studies scholar. This job wanted that.”

Still others earned their undergraduate degrees from UC Berkeley, including Professor Adam Badawi J.D. ’03, Ph.D. ’04 and Clinical Professor Stephanie Campos-Bui ’14, or doctorates from other departments at the school, including Professor Dhammika Dharmapala (Economics).

Teaching at Berkeley Law as an alum is a unique experience — and a privilege, they say.

“I smile every time I walk into the building,” says Badawi, who returned in 2017. “I feel incredibly lucky and fortunate to work here and I hope to give a little back to the institution that has given so much to me.”

Human Rights Center Co-Faculty Director Alexa Koenig Ph.D. ’13 first joined the center as a JSP student, used her work there as grist for her dissertation, and never left.

“In addition to not having to leave such an inspiring place and such inspiring people, the connection hopefully strengthens my advising of students, given that I went through the same program and had the same teachers and many of the same experiences,” she says.

“Being at Berkeley for many years, leaving to teach elsewhere, and then coming back gives you a certain perspective on the characteristics that make Berkeley special,” says Albiston, who taught at Wisconsin Law for two years before joining Berkeley Law’s faculty in 2003.

Familiarity breeds a deep appreciation for the interdisciplinary community on campus, the active faculty governance practices, and Berkeley’s public mission amid a vigorous intellectual culture, Albiston adds.

Campos-Bui, co-director of Berkeley Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic, is similarly enervated by the students’ diligence, creativity, and smarts.

“Each semester, I have the privilege of working with 30 or so new students who are eager and excited about gaining the tools and expertise to go out and change the world,” she says. “I learn so much from our students and they consistently challenge me to be a better advocate and teacher.”

Koenig is particularly unusual because she’s also held staff and faculty positions at the school, giving her a unique perspective into what it means to belong at Berkeley.

“Each has come with distinct frustrations and rewards,” she says. “But what’s been common is the opportunity to work with a disproportionately high number of truly kind people who are brilliant, dedicated, creative, and inspiring.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw

As graduation neared, Sati reached out to Professor Sarah Song, who studies immigration and immigrants and encouraged him to apply to JSP. Song and Professor Christopher Kutz became his Ph.D. advisers.

Sati also completed a J.D. at Yale — a double-coasted accomplishment made a bit easier by some pandemic-era remote learning. With a first semester of teaching under his belt, he’s more grateful than ever for his graduate student experience. Before going on the job market, he did multiple mock interviews and job talks organized by Professor Jonah Gelbach, who chairs the school’s Academic Placement Committee.

“They were tougher than what I experienced on the market, so I felt really well prepared,” Sati says. “I felt very supported, not just within the JSP faculty, but within the larger law school faculty. I came out of the fall semester knowing that I love this job, and that if I invest time into it, I’ll be rewarded. That’s a great thing.”

Julian Nyarko came to Berkeley Law from Germany for an LL.M. degree, and the program confirmed his wish for an academic job in the United States. Interested in law and economics, he returned and joined the JSP Program, learning from field legends like Professor Robert Cooter and venturing into UC Berkeley’s renowned economics and political science departments.

“I got a lot of my training and that interdisciplinary angle there, and then brought that into JSP,” Nyarko says. “That was one of the big advantages: the freedom to go out and pick up the skills where I needed them.”

“Grad school is the time to pick up skills you can benefit from for the rest of your life as a professor — in my case, the hard quantitative classes,” he says. “Once you’re a professional academic, you don’t have time to learn as much anymore. It was incredibly valuable to have the space during my Ph.D. work to pick up those methodological skills that I’m using in my day-to-day work now.

“I definitely didn’t appreciate that as a student.”

“Thankfully, Professor Abrams explained the facts, law, and theory so clearly that I left feeling as though I not only understood the cases but wanted to explore related scholarship — and that exploration deepened my understanding and raised some new questions for me to analyze,” he says. “I realized the impact and role of legal academics: introducing students to the law as teachers and providing the legal community as a whole with scholarship that pushes them to dive even further into the legal weeds.”

Later, a seminar with Professor Tejas N. Narechania gave Frazier the opportunity to try his hand at a scholarly article, further cementing his ambition.

Frazier took an unorthodox route to his job at the St. Thomas University Benjamin L. Crump College of Law: While clerking for the Montana Supreme Court’s chief justice, mentor and Professor Chris Jay Hoofnagle convinced him to jump into the academic hiring cycle late in the game. A nibble from St. Thomas became a full-fledged hiring process, and Frazier walked into the classroom just over a year after getting his J.D.

He credits the law school, including his time at the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, for building a strong academic career foundation.

“Berkeley Law afforded several opportunities to not only identify the topics that now form the core of my research agenda — namely regulating emerging technologies — but also to practice writing on those topics,” Frazier says. “For example, in addition to Professor Narechania’s course, I had the chance to write on undersea cable regulation and the Law of the Sea through courses taught by Professors Holly Doremus and John Yoo. At the journal, I was exposed to new and exciting legal scholarship on similar topics.”

Stephen Cody, recently named Teacher of the Year at Suffolk Law, also enjoyed prime mentoring during his long stint in Berkeley. While working on a sociology Ph.D., he applied for a part-time job at the Human Rights Center (HRC) to supplement his teaching stipend, working on a study of former Guantanamo Bay detainees with Professors Eric Stover, Laurel E. Fletcher, and JSP alum Alexa Koenig.

“The job changed my life. My interest in law and legal procedure blossomed,” Cody says. “The research exposed the crucial roles of military lawyers in resisting the expansion of coercive interrogations and torture. Because of this work, I shifted my dissertation research to focus on overbroad counterterrorism laws worldwide.”

Cody also went to law school, spending his 1L summer and the fall of his 2L year at Human Rights Watch, building an archive of counterterrorism laws and serving as a nongovernmental organization observer to the Guantanamo military commissions. When he returned to Berkeley Law, “JSP faculty and graduate students adopted me,” he says.

He enrolled in JSP courses, and Professor Jonathan Simon — a JSP alum himself — was on his committee. Fletcher and Abrams championed his legal scholarship and also wrote him recommendation letters.

After finishing his degrees, Cody worked as a research director for the HRC’s Atrocity Response Program and co-supervised students in the International Human Rights Workshop and International Human Rights Law Clinic.

“Eric Stover remains the greatest influence on my life and work from my time at Berkeley Law,” he says. “Eric embodies the kind of engaged academic that I aspire to be. He keeps his boots on the ground, always listening to communities impacted by human rights violations, and yet he also finds ways to build coalitions and shape high-level debates on policy and legal reform. One of the great privileges of my life was to return to the Human Rights Center as a research director and work beside Eric Stover and Alexa Koenig.”

“A successful academic is someone who can ask good questions,” he says. “Watching how your professors formulate the good questions and try to figure out what’s a good idea and a bad idea to pursue, that’s a little bit more of an art than a skill. That’s something to pay attention to as a young prospective scholar.”

Over and over again in recounting their student experiences, alumni academics returned to the school’s culture, people, and incredible breadth. Whether it’s been a handful of years since their graduation or decades, many say they try to carry that with them now that they’re wearing the professor’s hat.

“Berkeley Law is extraordinary,” Rowen says. “I’ve now been at multiple institutions and I still haven’t found one that compares. There is not in my experience a law school with such engagement of students and faculty and such an active intellectual life.

“I am so grateful I was there for so long.”

“What would happen if you mixed a funky old house full of Ph.D.-wielding social scientists and philosophers interested in law and society and a top-ranked law school with strong ties to the elites of the legal profession?” he says. “There was not a little sense of dread that if the experiment went horribly awry it could undermine Berkeley’s standing as a national law school and create a dead end of researchers more interested in justifying the U.S. legal system than critically evaluating it.”

Since Simon returned to Berkeley Law in 2003 to teach, “the biggest delight has been to experience firsthand how wildly the experiment succeeded,” he says, noting that the faculty now has more Ph.D. holders than nearly any other law school in America. “I truly believe that creating the JSP Program changed Berkeley Law’s DNA back in the ’80s and helped make us the most innovative law school of the 21st century.”

JSP grew out of the demise of UC Berkeley’s Criminology Department in the 1970s. Over nearly half a century, the Ph.D.-granting program has trained students working on a wide range of social science fields as they intersect with law.

These days — with a Ph.D. increasingly essential to unlocking jobs in legal academia — the program offers a unique opportunity to study with experts at the intersection of law and sociology, public health, philosophy, economics, and more.

“JSP is the perfect place for intellectual square pegs in round holes,” says Professor Catherine Albiston J.D. ’93, Ph.D. ’01. “If you’re someone like me who doesn’t fit neatly into a particular disciplinary community, the interdisciplinarity of JSP provides space to pursue your interests in a rigorous way.”

Graduates who have gone on to academic careers — in law schools as well as social science departments — say the program molded them into better and broader thinkers. They also laud the invaluable faculty mentoring, a program hallmark since the early days with Berkeley Law legends Philip Selznick, Caleb Foote, Sheldon Messinger, and Lauren Edelman ’86, who died last year.

“We take legal doctrine quite seriously, but we want to understand how it actually matters in the world,” says Professor Diana Reddy Ph.D. ’23, an Edelman student. “JSP was the perfect program for what I wanted to do. It allowed me to ask the complex and inherently interdisciplinary questions that I had come back to academia, after seven years of legal practice, to try and answer.”

“I am deeply grateful to the JSP Program and Berkeley Law for providing me with a multi- and interdisciplinary experience, one grounded in social justice considerations, kickstarting the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work I do today,” says Human Rights Center Co-Faculty Director Alexa Koenig Ph.D. ’13.

Unlike many other J.D./Ph.D. programs, JSP is fully integrated in terms of courses and faculty.

It’s a real asset in the current unpredictable academic job market. JSP alums are teaching in a wide range of disciplines as well as law schools.

“Having all these resources under one roof, so to speak, gives us an edge over other graduate programs, where law is far less central and less integrated into disciplinary training, and where it is harder to get in-depth exposure to law-oriented approaches from multiple disciplines,” says Professor Dylan Penningroth, associate dean for the JSP and Legal Studies programs.

“This interdisciplinary approach to law also affords our graduate students a distinctive training as teachers, as they are able to hone their pedagogy in Legal Studies — one of the biggest, most diverse, and prizewinning undergraduate majors on campus. “All of this adds up to a strong placement record.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw