Advancement
New JSP Fellowship Fund Fueled by Kindred Spirits
About a month after Cooter’s death on Sept. 8, his wife Blair Dean Cooter had dinner with Rubinfeld.
“I’d been thinking it would be really nice to do something to support the program that I was so strongly affiliated with and feel so strongly about,” says Rubinfeld, who retired a few years ago after nearly four decades at Berkeley Law. “I said I was putting together a significant gift, and was thrilled to hear Blair immediately respond, ‘Great idea, I should join you on that.’”
Established with $500,000 pledges from each of them, the new Robert Cooter and Daniel Rubinfeld JSP Fellowship Fund will support fellowships for JSP students pursuing graduate work in law and economics, law and politics, or data sciences.
“I thought Bob would have wanted me to do this,” Blair says. “He was extremely grateful to the law school, and JSP in particular, for giving him a haven in which he could pursue his interest in the intersection of law, philosophy, and economics.”
A dedicated teacher, two-time JSP chair, and prolific scholar in antitrust and competition policy, law and economics, and public economics, Rubinfeld also served as an ALEA president. He has consulted for private parties and public agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, and is proud of his World Bank-affiliated work in post-apartheid South Africa.
“I moved to Berkeley in part because I was very interested in interdisciplinary academic work, I was excited about law and economics, and I was a big fan of Bob Cooter’s work,” says Rubinfeld, who served as chief economist and Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust in the Department of Justice. “It’s important to me that the program continues to foster law and economics, law and politics, and data sciences, and to have the means to encourage talented people to come here and do important research.”
When it was decided soon after Cooter’s hiring to add another economist, he suggested Rubinfeld, then teaching at the University of Michigan.
“When he came to Berkeley with his wife, Gail, for the traditional look-over, I was deputized to take Gail to lunch,” Blair says. “I decided to lure her with dim sum, something not available in Ann Arbor in 1983. We liked each other immediately, and I was delighted when Dan accepted Berkeley’s offer.”
Citing JSP’s strong faculty roster and track record in training top academics, Rubinfeld also appreciates the program’s collegial culture. His dynamic with Cooter helped set the tone.
“We’d get together for dinner and activities, and frankly it’s quite unusual for two people in the same field to have such a supportive, cooperative relationship,” he says. “Sometimes there can be a lot of competitive tension, but we co-wrote a bunch of articles, jogged up the fire trails together, and spent a lot of time with each other. That makes this gift very meaningful to me.”
Blair says her husband — a psychology major with minors in English and philosophy who “parsed William Blake’s poetry and James Joyce’s esoterica in Ulysses and staked out wildlife in the campus woodland for his Ethology class” — was well-suited for interdisciplinary work. Later a Fulbright Scholar at Oxford, Cooter earned his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard.
Rubinfeld’s interdisciplinary perspective came from different roots. As a math major at Princeton with a strong interest in public policy, MIT’s economics program, along with its neighboring politics department, was the perfect fit for him. He is particularly proud of his recent book, Democratic Federalism, which contains a mix of economics, politics, and the law.
“Bob and Dan have been grateful to the JSP Program for deciding to have multiple faculty members in each of its disciplines,” Blair says. “I am very pleased and grateful to join Dan in supporting future generations in thinking about questions he and Bob wrestled with and believe that Bob would be delighted that this will be part of his legacy.”
‘Berkeley Made Doing This A Possibility’
“I was turned down everywhere I applied in California on the grounds that I didn’t have a bachelor’s degree,” she says. “But the degree they were looking for wasn’t available in Norway.”
After successfully making her case in Berkeley Law’s admissions office, with strong marks from nursing school and law school in Norway and stellar recommendation letters, the former Norwegian Student Nurses Association president enrolled at age 32.
Having visited an aunt in the Bay Area, Stromsheim returned in 1973 to work at UCSF Medical Center. There she met the love of her life, British nurse Angela Benson. They later moved to Norway, Stromsheim starting law school with a plan to combine nursing and law and Benson working as a nurse.
Missing California, Benson persuaded Stromsheim to move back and apply to law school there. After graduating, Stromsheim spent two years clerking for a federal bankruptcy judge in Oakland and eight specializing in bankruptcy at a firm in San Francisco, then ran her own practice from 1992 until retiring in 2004 — with Benson the office manager.
Stromsheim maintained close ties with her home country, serving as president of the Norwegian-American Chamber of Commerce’s Northern California chapter and helping at Norway House, originally a space where Norwegian sailors stranded during World War II could sleep and get food until a new ship came in.
“After the war ended, it became a social center for Norwegians until an unhappy neighbor learned there was no permit for such activities and the building was sold,” she says. “The proceeds were turned into another charity named Norway House Foundation, and I served on its board for many years.”
Still active today, the organization has helped send numerous students from Norway to UC Berkeley.
Stromsheim points out that one of the university’s founders is a Norwegian immigrant: Peder Sather, “who became a banker after the gold rush and one of the richest men in California,” she says. “Sather Gate is well enough known, I’m just taking baby steps after him.”
She describes her gift as an easy decision and a mark of gratitude: “Berkeley made doing this a possibility and the law school launched my very rewarding career.”
Giving to the Berkeley Law Fund allows the school to deploy dollars where and when they’re most needed. With rising threats to the rule of law around the world, Stromsheim says Berkeley “needs the money these days more than at any time before.”
While retired, Stromsheim ran a half-marathon at age 75, another at 77, and still gets in 10,000 steps a day. An enthusiastic cook and traveler, she earned a sommelier certificate from the North American Sommelier Association.
Recently back in San Francisco for a major wine event, Stromsheim says, “The Bay Area carries a lot of warm memories for me.”
Celebrating Our Newest Lawyers
California Court of Appeal Associate Justice Jon B. Streeter ’81 and U.S. District Court Judge for the Northern District of California Trina Thompson ’86 shared thoughts about the profession and administered the oath of admission to the state bar and federal district court, respectively. Berkeley Law Alumni Association Board President Yury Kapgan ’01 and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky also spoke to the roughly 70 alumni sworn in during the ceremony and over 150 guests — family, friends, staff, and faculty — who came to celebrate their achievement.
Tribute to a Tech Law Titan
“Berkeley Law really gave me a career,” he says. “I was lucky to have professors who loved teaching and were really interested in meeting with students and helping them find what they were passionate about and learn how to think through it on a sophisticated level. On top of that, it gave me a professional community that I still benefit from.
“Being a practicing lawyer in the Bay Area, there’s not a better place to have come from than Berkeley Law.”
Gass and his wife, Jenny Wilson, wanted to make that kind of transformational experience easier for future students. So they’ve endowed a post-graduate fellowship in public interest technology law named for tech law titan and Berkeley Law Professor Pamela Samuelson. The first fellow will be in place this fall.
Dean Erwin Chemerinsky has made funding these fellowships a key priority. But with new restrictions on federally subsidized borrowing for professional schools on the horizon, alumni donors will be vital to maintaining and expanding the program, including increasing the stipend amount.
“I wanted to be thoughtful about figuring out the most impactful way to make sure other people have the same opportunities I did to pursue whatever they want,” Gass says. “Something really important to me was finding a way to make someone’s life better and easier so they were able to chart the course they wanted for their career. I also wanted to honor some of the people who made it possible for me to do what I do today — and to be in a position to give back in this way.”
Gass took Samuelson’s Copyright Law course during his 1L spring semester, and later that year she reached out to him about taking a new “open source course” she was teaching — the beginning of an influential relationship that remains strong to this day.
“It was essential to honor Professor Samuelson, who has really been one of the great mentors of my career, with this gift,” he says. “It’s not news to anyone that Professor Samuelson is a leading scholar and leading light of the IP world. But it is staggering the number of people that she has served as one of the formative guiding mentors of their career, and it was really important to me to figure out a way to recognize the contributions that she made to a whole generation — really multiple generations — of lawyers and scholars.”
Gonzalez, who also earned an undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley, was motivated to give by a commitment to advancing climate solutions, expanding social mobility, and strengthening student success. She wants to help ensure that aspiring public interest lawyers have equitable access to the experience and support to be prepared for high-impact, purpose-driven careers.
Relishing a Supportive Campus Environment
Summer is a vital time to gain job experience for law students focused on environmental or energy work, but money is a perennial hurdle: While students pursuing private sector jobs can often command five-figure salaries, those passionate about public interest or public service may only receive a modest stipend or nothing at all. Add on law school tuition and the high cost of living in many legal hubs, and the challenge of staying true to career goals can be formidable.
Fortunately, Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) donors make a major difference through gifts that help many Berkeley Law students pursue their passion for service without undue financial stress. Each year, the center’s Energy & Environmental Futures Fund helps Ecology Law Quarterly award summer fellowships for 2Ls slated to work with a public interest organization or in the public sector.
Paskowitz parlayed her fellowship into a memorable summer at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), where she worked on environmental law and policy issues within the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), clean energy, and pesticide regulation. Her projects involved drafting a model PFAS reporting regulation for the textile industry, writing a memo and comment letter analyzing a state groundwater pesticide regulatory program and proposed changes, and surveying NEPA data to help inform litigation strategy.
“NRDC was my dream organization because of its longstanding leadership in environmental advocacy and its unique model that brings together in-house science, policy, and legal experts to address complex environmental challenges holistically,” she says. “I am deeply grateful to CLEE for making this experience possible.”
Donors like Martin Mattes ’74, who has led the California Public Utilities Commission legal team, represented utilities, and navigated complex environmental reviews during his career, make an enormous difference. As he became a prominent figure in water and energy regulation, his philanthropic and advisory support grew.
A CLEE Advisory Board member for over a decade, Mattes and his wife, Cathy, have been generous multi-year donors to CLEE through unrestricted giving.
Paskowitz describes the summer fellowship funding as “an important resource for environmentally-focused 2Ls because it removes financial barriers to public interest placements, allowing them to gain meaningful experience, build expertise, and contribute to high-impact work in the environmental space.”