Study Hall

Faculty Honors & Scholarship

Research Spotlight:

Enhancing An Impressive Tradition

Professors Manisha Padi, Veronica Aoki Santarosa, and Aaron S. Edlin chatting outdoors in front of trees with red and orange leaves

BRAIN TREE: (From left) Professors Manisha Padi, Veronica Aoki Santarosa, and Aaron S. Edlin are part of a stellar law and economics faculty. Photo by Tylor Norwood

ore than 40 years ago, UC Berkeley Law faculty helped pioneer the visionary field of law and economics. Today, a deep bench of scholars is not just upholding that tradition but advancing it.

Renowned emeritus professors Robert Cooter and Daniel Rubinfeld put the school — and the field — on the map with pathbreaking research incorporating economic insights into the study of law. Cooter, Rubinfeld, and Professor Aaron S. Edlin have all been president of the American Law and Economics Association.

UC Berkeley Law continues to prioritize the area, hiring seven professors who specialize in it in the past six years while bolstering course offerings for J.D. students and those in the Ph.D.-granting Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program (JSP).

Calling Cooter, Rubinfeld, Edlin, and Professor Alan Auerbach “giants in the field,” Professor Andrew C. Baker says the school has built on that foundation to house “the deepest and best bench of empirical legal researchers in the country — a unique strength of our institution.”

The crux of law and economics, Edlin explains, is analyzing law from the perspective of choosing the law that’s best for society rather than textual analysis or legal philosophy: “Figuring that out with data, as opposed to pure theory, is a huge advance.”

His colleagues work in myriad fields. The largest cluster, including Professors Kenneth Ayotte, Adam Badawi, Baker, Ofer Eldar, Stavros Gadinis, Prasad Krishnamurthy, Frank Partnoy, and Steven Davidoff Solomon, focuses on the wide spectrum of business and corporate law.

Professors Dhammika Dharmapala, Ofer Eldar, Andrew C. Baker, and Jonah B. Gelbach wearing business casual attire and standing together in front of a building

STAR POWER: (From left) Professors Dhammika Dharmapala, Ofer Eldar, Andrew C. Baker, and Jonah B. Gelbach. Photo by Tylor Norwood

Professor Manisha Padi analyzes the economics of consumer finance contracts, and Professor Abhay Aneja probes how legal institutions affect economic and social inequality. Professor Jonah B. Gelbach has applied statistical tools to court records to tease out civil procedure trends and offer new statistical evidence approaches.

Professor Veronica Aoki Santarosa, a legal and economic historian, uses original archival research to study how the law creates and supports markets. She and Professor Dhammika Dharmapala, an expert on taxation and public finance, the economic analysis of law, and corporate finance and governance, teach JSP courses.

Professors Peter S. Menell and Robert P. Merges, architects of the school’s massive tech law footprint, bring an economist’s perspective to intellectual property and copyright. Other faculty also draw from the law and economics toolbox, including Gadinis and Professors Katerina Linos and David Hausman.

“Berkeley offers unparalleled support and freedom to pursue one’s own scholarly agenda,” Santarosa says. “I appreciate the law school’s commitment to interdisciplinary cooperation across the university — we have so much to learn from each other.”

The Berkeley Center for Law and Business is another hub for faculty and students, and Edlin leads the Law, Economics & Politics Center — which strengthens ties between the law school and many other campus units.

With established senior scholars and younger faculty making a splash, Gelbach sees Berkeley as “the best place in the world to be a law and economics scholar.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw

Honors Spotlight:

Flourishing Faculty

From prestigious national appointments to award-hoarding books, UC Berkeley Law educators are routinely heralded for their widespread impact and expertise.

vector graphic of a woman standing on a stack of books and wearing a cape while reaching for a star

Illustration by Mohamed Hassan

AGENCY WITH AGENCIES: Professor Seth Davis was appointed to a two-year term on the Administrative Conference of the United States. The independent federal agency identifies and promotes improvements in the fairness, efficiency, and adequacy of procedures that federal agencies use for regulatory programs, grants, benefits, and other functions. An award-winning teacher, Davis explores questions of sovereignty, responsibility, and redress as they arise in public law and private law.

RACING FORWARD: Renowned author and speaker Savala Nolan ’11, executive director of our Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, won the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Keynote Living the Dream Award for “groundbreaking work in promoting racial justice and equity” that “set new standards for progress.” She spearheaded the school’s Race and Law concentration and an endowed racial justice fellowship, and contributed to the Peabody Award-winning NPR podcast “The Promise.”

PAGING EXCELLENCE: Professor Dylan Penningroth’s buzz-generating book Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights won a whopping 12 awards and was a finalist or shortlisted for four others. Examining slavery’s last decades to the 1970s, partly tracing his own family’s history, Penningroth challenges accepted understandings and shows how Black people regularly dealt with the laws of property, contract, inheritance, marriage, divorce, associations, and more.

STANDOUT SCHOLAR: Dean Erwin Chemerinsky won the 2025 American Bar Foundation Outstanding Scholar Award, which honors someone who produced outstanding scholarship on the law or government. Last year, in addition to publishing many articles and op-eds, Chemerinsky released his new book No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, as well as the seventh edition of his Constitutional Law casebook and the third edition of his First Amendment casebook.

GLOBAL CITIZENS: Our Honorable G. William and Ariadna Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law was chosen from over 100 nominees for one of the East Bay Chapter of the United Nations Association’s annual Global Citizen Awards. An association executive committee member wrote that Professors and Co-Directors Laurel Fletcher and Katerina Linos, Administrator Toni Mendicino, and the institute “are exemplary due to your outstanding record of teaching, research, and advocacy.”

BROADBAND BUZZ: Professor Tejas N. Narechania co-authored a paper that won the Internet Research Task Force Applied Networking Research Prize for showing large gaps in broadband availability and information quality certified by major Internet service providers to the federal government compared to what’s truly offered to end users. The paper was the basis of an amicus curiae brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court regarding a False Claims Act case against an AT&T subsidiary.

Scholarship Spotlight:

Prolific and Perceptive Professors

UC Berkeley Law’s faculty is stocked with expert excavators who dig well beneath the surface to assess what lies at the root of society’s vexing issues. Their data-driven work regularly unearths pathbreaking revelations, offers timely analysis, and ignites broad efforts to pursue meaningful change.

Here are a dozen recent examples showcasing the depth and importance of their wide-ranging scholarship.

ADAM BADAWI
WITH ROBERT BARTLETT

ESG Overperformance? Assessing the Use of ESG Targets in Executive Compensation Plans

European Corporate Governance Institute

Linking executive compensation to ESG (environmental, social, governance) performance has recently become more prevalent — 63% of S&P 500 firms did so during the 2023 proxy season. The authors reveal how often executives miss, meet, or exceed the financial and ESG-based targets in their compensation plans, find that it’s extremely rare to miss these targets, and show how ESG overperformance is more often related to governance deficiencies rather than exceptional outcomes.

ADAM BADAWI
WITH ROBERT BARTLETTESG Overperformance? Assessing the Use of ESG Targets in Executive Compensation PlansEuropean Corporate Governance InstituteLinking executive compensation to ESG (environmental, social, governance) performance has recently become more prevalent — 63% of S&P 500 firms did so during the 2023 proxy season. The authors reveal how often executives miss, meet, or exceed the financial and ESG-based targets in their compensation plans, find that it’s extremely rare to miss these targets, and show how ESG overperformance is more often related to governance deficiencies rather than exceptional outcomes.

KHIARA M. BRIDGES

Race in the Machine: Racial Disparities in Health and Medical AI

Virginia Law Review

Bridges describes how people of color — who suffer higher illness rates than their white counterparts as well as poorer outcomes when treated for the same illnesses — are not informed that their health is managed by artificial intelligence that likely encodes centuries of inequitable medical care. Her paper highlights problems of algorithmic bias and sobering concerns for pregnant people of color, and argues that healthcare providers should disclose their use of these AI technologies to patients.

KHIARA M. BRIDGESRace in the Machine: Racial Disparities in Health and Medical AIVirginia Law ReviewBridges describes how people of color — who suffer higher illness rates than their white counterparts as well as poorer outcomes when treated for the same illnesses — are not informed that their health is managed by artificial intelligence that likely encodes centuries of inequitable medical care. Her paper highlights problems of algorithmic bias and sobering concerns for pregnant people of color, and argues that healthcare providers should disclose their use of these AI technologies to patients.

HANOCH DAGAN
WITH AVIHAY DORFMAN

Relational Justice: A Theory of Private Law

Oxford University Press

What makes private law private? What is its domain, and the values it promotes? The authors build on years of their scholarship to lay out a new approach for understanding some of society’s most important building blocks. They argue that private law should, and to a significant degree already does, abide by the fundamental commitment to reciprocal respect for self-determination and substantive equality — which form the core of what Dagan and Dorfman call “relational justice.”

HANOCH DAGAN
WITH AVIHAY DORFMANRelational Justice: A Theory of Private LawOxford University PressWhat makes private law private? What is its domain, and the values it promotes? The authors build on years of their scholarship to lay out a new approach for understanding some of society’s most important building blocks. They argue that private law should, and to a significant degree already does, abide by the fundamental commitment to reciprocal respect for self-determination and substantive equality — which form the core of what Dagan and Dorfman call “relational justice.”

MALCOLM FEELEY
WITH VAN SWEARINGEN

From Plantation Prisons to the Modern Era

Vital City

The authors assess the ongoing crisis at New York City’s Rikers Island jail and the lessons of past prison reform efforts by jurists to dismantle Southern prisons originally modeled on plantations and mandate changes in California. The paper argues that persistently failing prisons are like failing companies that can be declared bankrupt and placed in receivership, and proposes that such prisons also be declared bankrupt with a receiver appointed to reorganize them.

MALCOLM FEELEY
WITH VAN SWEARINGENFrom Plantation Prisons to the Modern EraVital CityThe authors assess the ongoing crisis at New York City’s Rikers Island jail and the lessons of past prison reform efforts by jurists to dismantle Southern prisons originally modeled on plantations and mandate changes in California. The paper argues that persistently failing prisons are like failing companies that can be declared bankrupt and placed in receivership, and proposes that such prisons also be declared bankrupt with a receiver appointed to reorganize them.

CHRIS JAY HOOFNAGLE
WITH GOLDEN G. RICHARD III

Cybersecurity in Context

Wiley

This textbook and complementary set of technical exercises, the first introduction to society’s full range of cybersecurity challenges and solutions, probes the technical detail and social relevance of security. Noting that cybersecurity links computers, data, people, economics, psychology, military science, international relations, and law, the authors offer frameworks and alternatives to find security approaches that are freedom-enhancing, not freedom-crushing.

CHRIS JAY HOOFNAGLE
WITH GOLDEN G. RICHARD IIICybersecurity in ContextWileyThis textbook and complementary set of technical exercises, the first introduction to society’s full range of cybersecurity challenges and solutions, probes the technical detail and social relevance of security. Noting that cybersecurity links computers, data, people, economics, psychology, military science, international relations, and law, the authors offer frameworks and alternatives to find security approaches that are freedom-enhancing, not freedom-crushing.

PRASAD KRISHNAMURTHY
WITH TUCKER COCHENOUR

An Economic Case Against Public Banking, and a Case for It

Journal of Financial Regulation

The authors examine the economics of public consumer banking in the U.S., which can take the form of price subsidies or direct provision. Detailing reasons why the economic case for both is rather weak, they cite check cashing and related payment services as exceptions — if the institutional infrastructure exists to deliver them effectively. Without it, they urge expanding the financial services offered to federal beneficiaries, such as Social Security recipients, by the U.S. Treasury.

PRASAD KRISHNAMURTHY
WITH TUCKER COCHENOURAn Economic Case Against Public Banking, and a Case for ItJournal of Financial RegulationThe authors examine the economics of public consumer banking in the U.S., which can take the form of price subsidies or direct provision. Detailing reasons why the economic case for both is rather weak, they cite check cashing and related payment services as exceptions — if the institutional infrastructure exists to deliver them effectively. Without it, they urge expanding the financial services offered to federal beneficiaries, such as Social Security recipients, by the U.S. Treasury.

JOHN A. POWELL

The Power of Bridging: How to Build a World Where We All Belong

Sounds True Publishing

A guide for connecting across differences, powell offers a framework for building cohesion and solidarity between disparate beliefs and backgrounds amid society’s growing divisiveness. His book says bridging is more than a set of actions, noting that it’s a mindset that can be cultivated to foster belonging and connection. He shares personal reflections and concrete practices to help bridge differences in one’s community, friendships, family, and workplace.

JOHN A. POWELLThe Power of Bridging: How to Build a World Where We All BelongSounds True PublishingA guide for connecting across differences, powell offers a framework for building cohesion and solidarity between disparate beliefs and backgrounds amid society’s growing divisiveness. His book says bridging is more than a set of actions, noting that it’s a mindset that can be cultivated to foster belonging and connection. He shares personal reflections and concrete practices to help bridge differences in one’s community, friendships, family, and workplace.

ASAD RAHIM

The Legitimacy Trap

Boston University Law Review

The educational path of today’s law students hasn’t changed much since the late 1800s: They largely take the same required courses, are assigned appellate opinion readings, and have professors using the Socratic method. Rahim says these practices were modeled after Charles Darwin’s study of organisms and pushed by corporate law firms because the high-stress culture benefited them, and that law schools now aiming to be welcoming and inclusive still default to an educational model that was created to intimidate.

ASAD RAHIMThe Legitimacy TrapBoston University Law ReviewThe educational path of today’s law students hasn’t changed much since the late 1800s: They largely take the same required courses, are assigned appellate opinion readings, and have professors using the Socratic method. Rahim says these practices were modeled after Charles Darwin’s study of organisms and pushed by corporate law firms because the high-stress culture benefited them, and that law schools now aiming to be welcoming and inclusive still default to an educational model that was created to intimidate.

DIANA S. REDDY

Labor Law Breaks Free: Reviving State Capacity to Protect Workers Under the NLRA

Roosevelt Institute

Reddy looks at recent innovations by the National Labor Relations Board, which was highly proactive during the Biden administration and made labor law more relevant and responsive than it’s been in decades. But with many board innovations under attack from courts, anti-union corporations, and politicians, will its recent efforts survive? “As a legal matter, they should,” Reddy writes. “As a political matter, well, that depends on us.”

DIANA S. REDDYLabor Law Breaks Free: Reviving State Capacity to Protect Workers Under the NLRARoosevelt InstituteReddy looks at recent innovations by the National Labor Relations Board, which was highly proactive during the Biden administration and made labor law more relevant and responsive than it’s been in decades. But with many board innovations under attack from courts, anti-union corporations, and politicians, will its recent efforts survive? “As a legal matter, they should,” Reddy writes. “As a political matter, well, that depends on us.”

ANDREA ROTH

The Embarrassing Sixth Amendment

California Law Review

The Sixth Amendment ensures assistance of counsel in “all criminal prosecutions,” yet the Supreme Court has ruled the right doesn’t apply in state cases with no jail sentence. With defendants being convicted, fined, detained, and deported without a lawyer, and the current court’s textualist bent, Roth poses reasons why progressives aren’t pushing back harder, rebuts them, and urges engaging the text to explore enforcing a right to counsel in all prosecutions.

ANDREA ROTHThe Embarrassing Sixth AmendmentCalifornia Law ReviewThe Sixth Amendment ensures assistance of counsel in “all criminal prosecutions,” yet the Supreme Court has ruled the right doesn’t apply in state cases with no jail sentence. With defendants being convicted, fined, detained, and deported without a lawyer, and the current court’s textualist bent, Roth poses reasons why progressives aren’t pushing back harder, rebuts them, and urges engaging the text to explore enforcing a right to counsel in all prosecutions.

JEFFREY SELBIN

Suicide by Cop? How Junk Science and Bad Law Undermine Accountability for Killings by Police

California Law Review

Selbin offers the first critical examination of “suicide by cop” as a law enforcement theory that shifts the blame for excessive use of police force to victims, shields police from accountability, and undermines civil rights. He explains that the term “suicide by cop,” shorthand for encounters in which civilians allegedly provoke a lethal response from law enforcement, has become a form of malleable junk science that police officers are increasingly using as a broad defense against both individual and institutional liability.

JEFFREY SELBINSuicide by Cop? How Junk Science and Bad Law Undermine Accountability for Killings by PoliceCalifornia Law ReviewSelbin offers the first critical examination of “suicide by cop” as a law enforcement theory that shifts the blame for excessive use of police force to victims, shields police from accountability, and undermines civil rights. He explains that the term “suicide by cop,” shorthand for encounters in which civilians allegedly provoke a lethal response from law enforcement, has become a form of malleable junk science that police officers are increasingly using as a broad defense against both individual and institutional liability.

LETI VOLPP

Weep the People

UC Law Journal

The idea of citizenship promises the belonging that is necessary to the very idea of “We the People,” the opening phrase of the U.S. Constitution. Yet citizenship simultaneously excludes those who fall outside the borders of belonging. Volpp’s paper explains that while “We the People” rhetorically suggests that citizenship might come with a guarantee of universal inclusivity, in reality this remains an unfulfilled promise — with race, in particular, threatening the equality associated with citizenship.

LETI VOLPPWeep the PeopleUC Law JournalThe idea of citizenship promises the belonging that is necessary to the very idea of “We the People,” the opening phrase of the U.S. Constitution. Yet citizenship simultaneously excludes those who fall outside the borders of belonging. Volpp’s paper explains that while “We the People” rhetorically suggests that citizenship might come with a guarantee of universal inclusivity, in reality this remains an unfulfilled promise — with race, in particular, threatening the equality associated with citizenship.

Rankings Spotlight:

Highly Revered: Myriad Metrics Put Berkeley in Lofty Company

C Berkeley Law is rated the world’s No. 6 best law school in this year’s Times Higher Education World University Rankings, up from No. 8 last year.

The annual comprehensive assessment ranked 389 institutions from 48 countries and territories, using 18 performance metrics that reflect distinctive qualities within the academic discipline of law worldwide.

The rankings evaluate excellence across constitutional and administrative law, international law, commercial and corporate law, criminal law and justice, and legal theory and jurisprudence.

In addition, preLaw magazine’s field and subject rankings give UC Berkeley Law top marks across several disciplines, with an A+ rating for technology, international, criminal, intellectual property, environmental, human rights, and business law. Legal technology (ranked No. 1 nationally) and racial justice (No. 6) also garnered an A+ rating. The school earned an A for employment and public policy law, and an A- for trial advocacy.

UC Berkeley Law’s powerhouse faculty also ranks No. 6 among United States law schools in scholarly impact, according to the latest version of a study that tracks citations as a measure of professors’ influence.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is the school’s most-cited scholar and ranks second nationally. He and six fellow professors were recognized among the most-cited scholars in their fields between 2019 and 2023.

“I was delighted to see that Berkeley Law was sixth among all law schools in the country in the recent study of scholarly impact, as well as having many faculty who are among the most frequently cited in their fields,” he says. “This reflects that our school has a very prolific faculty whose scholarship is widely recognized as important and influential.”

Fellow professors Khiara M. Bridges, Daniel A. Farber, Ian Haney López, Peter S. Menell, Robert P. Merges, Pamela Samuelson, Steven Davidoff Solomon, and John Yoo rounded out the faculty’s most-cited scholars.

Chemerinsky, who is also the nation’s top-cited constitutional law professor during that stretch, calls the faculty’s ranking a testament to “the depth and breadth of their excellence.”

The so-called “Leiter score,” created by University of Chicago professor and law blogger Brian Leiter, calculates a faculty’s scholarly impact from the mean and median of tenured professors’ law journal citations over a five-year period. More recently, a group of St. Thomas University School of Law professors have updated the rankings every three years.

UC Berkeley Law ranked sixth in the 2021 rankings, up from seventh in 2018. The school has hired nearly 40 full-time professors since 2017 — including nine in one year in both 2019 and 2023 — bolstering an already impressive faculty with new ideas, scholarly agendas, and methodological chops.

Another recent ranking of citations for 114 tax law professors with Google Scholar pages lists UC Berkeley Law professors Alan Auerbach No. 2 and Dhammika Dharmapala No. 7, respectively. — Andrew Cohen & Gwyneth K. Shaw

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky smiling with a bookshelf in the background

REASON TO SMILE: Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is proud to see Berkeley ranked No. 6 for both best law school in the world and most scholarly impact among U.S. law school faculties.

UC Berkeley Law professors among the 15 most-cited scholars in their respective fields (2019-2023):

Erwin Chemerinsky,
No. 2, Constitutional Law

purple square Catherine Fisk,
No. 3, Labor & Employment Law

purple square Steven Davidoff Solomon,
No. 3, Corporate Law & Securities Regulation

purple square Jonathan Simon,
No. 7, Law & Social Science*

purple square Paul Schwartz,
No. 9, Law & Technology

purple square Christopher Tomlins,
No. 10 (tie), Legal History

purple square Sean Farhang,
No. 14, Law & Social Science*

QUADRENNIAL STUDY, UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS SCHOOL OF LAW
*Category does not include economics

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