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Faculty Honors & Scholarship

Scholarship Spotlight:

Intellectual Influencers

Berkeley Law’s faculty continue to push the scholarly envelope with impactful articles, essays, and books across a wide spectrum of fields. Here are eight recent publications — with insights from each professor about what motivated their research.
Abhay Aneja headshot
Abhay Aneja
with Silvia Farina and Guo Xu
Closing Gender Gaps Through Workplace Diversity: The Intergenerational Effects of World War I
Review of Economic Studies
Combining government personnel records with U.S. Census data, Aneja and his co-authors analyze the boom in government employment among women during World War I. They find that daughters of civil servants exposed to female co-workers are more likely to work later in life, potentially reflecting a persistent change in attitudes towards women in the workplace, and that this intergenerational effect came through fathers exposed to women colleagues. The effect closed the gender earnings gap by 12% — reflecting the move of women not only into the labor force but also into higher-earning jobs — and cities exposed to larger increases in female federal workers saw persistently higher female labor force participation in both the public and the private sector.

“I am interested both in the drivers of social equality over the long run, as well as the impact of increased representation of minorities within the major institutions of political and economic life.”

José Argueta Funes headshot
José Argueta Funes
Origin Stories in Property Law
Stanford Law Review
Using the development of private landownership in the Hawaiian Kingdom in the middle of the 19th century as a model, Argueta Funes explores how people navigate the transition between property regimes by advancing different plausible readings of that transition, which in turn privilege some forms of economic activity over others. He uses archival research to reconstruct conflicts over resources after the initial reforms to show how litigants, lawyers, and judges presented different understandings of how the new rules built on the traditional Hawaiian system.

“I wanted to show that part of understanding how property regimes (and laws generally) evolve over time requires us to understand how people gave meaning to change by offering competing interpretations.”

Khiara M. Bridges headshot
Khiara M. Bridges
Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans
MIT Press
Building on previous work about how race and racism are intertwined with maternal health care for Black women, Bridges spent two years observing a San Francisco obstetrics clinic that caters to the wealthy to analyze the choices class-privileged, pregnant Black people are making to survive. She finds that not only are Black people three to four times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause, but racial disparities in maternal mortality persist across income levels.

“Too often, people assume that wealth enables class-privileged Black folks to purchase an escape from racism. I thought it would be illuminating to investigate how racism persists in the lives of people whose socioeconomic status is imagined to immunize them from race-based disadvantage.”

Erwin Chemerinsky headshot
Erwin Chemerinsky
with Howard Gillman
Campus Speech and Academic Freedom: A Guide for Difficult Times
Yale University Press
In their second book on campus speech, Chemerinsky and Gillman offer expert analysis and guidance for campus leaders and communities as they navigate situations that challenge the boundaries of the expression of the widest possible range of views. From how to securely run contentious events to how to deal with social media-driven firestorms, they seek to help administrators, government officials, and the general public better understand and address these difficult issues.

“Howard Gillman and I wrote Free Speech on Campus in 2017. There have been so many issues with regard to freedom of speech and academic freedom since then — anti-Critical Race Theory laws, encampments on campuses, faculty being disciplined — we thought it important to write a new book addressing these issues and giving guidance to university administrators.”

Colleen V. Chien headshot
Colleen V. Chien ’02
with Isabela Ferrari and Niyati Narang
JudgeGPT: When Progress Meets Precedent
Berkeley Technology Law Journal
Chien and her co-authors — Ferrari is a Brazilian judge, Narang a Berkeley Law 3L — analyze early experiences with AI in the judicial systems of Brazil, China, and the United States, finding that traditions and priorities in each place inform their approaches to integrating the technology. As courts move from pilot projects to more permanent systems, the authors write that the central priority should be the quality and care with which AI is woven into judicial processes rather than just the speed or scale of its adoption.

“While much attention has focused on the problems AI has caused in courts, namely hallucinations, this paper is about the promise of AI to address the real issues that we face in the justice system, of backlogged courts, overworked judges, and litigants that can’t get the help they need.”

Sharon Jacobs headshot
Sharon Jacobs
Administration, Distrust, and the Energy Transition
Columbia Law Review
Reviewing David B. Spence’s recent book Climate of Contempt: How to Rescue the U.S. Energy Transition From Voter Partisanship, Jacobs analyzes recent moves by the executive branch to undercut knowledge production and dissemination at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Energy, and other federal agencies. She argues that substitutes for this critical information are unlikely to serve as adequate replacements and outlines steps Congress and others might take to “defend agency knowledge production, promote transparency, and strengthen the integrity of federal agency-produced data.”

“I wrote this piece to highlight the barriers that public distrust of government and weakened government capacity pose to the energy transition and to collective efforts to address climate change.”

Savala Nolan headshot
Savala NOLAN ’11
Good Woman: A Reckoning
HarperCollins
Blending memoir, reporting, and history, Nolan’s second essay collection takes aim at the restrictions placed on women — and those they place on themselves — in order to be seen as “good.” Drawing on her own moves to break free of the rules of female social conditioning, she mines gender roles, sex, politics, art, religion, and law to explore new frameworks for living. Like Bridges’ book, Good Woman was named a “Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2026” by Ms. magazine.

“Writing this book wasn’t so much a decision as an imperative. Like when you’re in labor it’s not a decision to have the baby — it’s just what’s happening! This book insisted on being born. I didn’t choose it. It’s more like I submitted to it, joyfully.”

David B. Oppenheimer headshot
David B. Oppenheimer
The Diversity Principle: The Story of a Transformative Idea
Yale University Press
A self-proclaimed “diversity skeptic turned admirer,” Oppenheimer traces the 200-year history of the idea that people with different backgrounds, experiences, identities, and viewpoints produce better work by engaging with one another. Along the way, it’s been the inspiration for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, become a foundational tenet of universities worldwide, and sparked movements across the globe. With diversity efforts now under attack, Oppenheimer makes the case for diversity as a core value for a robust intellectual and political culture.

“I wrote the book to correct the common misconception that diversity policies began in the 1970s as part of affirmative action, when they began in the early 19th century and were essential to the modern research university, academic freedom, free speech law, the desegregation movement (in the U.S. and South Africa), business practices, scientific inquiry, and democratic discourse.”

A professional portrait of a man with silver hair wearing a grey button-down shirt and a blue blazer
PUBLIC PERSPECTIVE: Professor Christopher Kutz’s new book merges political philosophy and comparative politics to examine the meaning and import of public institutions. Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small

Book Spotlight:

Collective Improvisation

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n his new book, Publics in Action: The Self-Making of Civic Life, Professor Christopher Kutz dives deeply into what it means to consider something public — be it an institution, a service, or a value — and how we can learn from each other in creating the communities we want to share.

His philosophy-rooted book is organized around a central metaphor of musical improvisation: showing how collective actions take shape as we draw on both tradition and inspiration, listening, responding, and reflecting one another in new melodies and rhythms. Kutz explores some of California’s policy successes, along with pragmatic ideas from France, Norway, and other liberal democracies, to frame a path toward change in the United States.

A Berkeley Law faculty member since 1998, Kutz teaches courses in criminal law and international law theory, as well as moral, political, and legal philosophy. He works with Ph.D. students in the school’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program and with undergraduates both in the Legal Studies major and in the Philosophy, Politics and Law minor he created in 2020.

“My work has always been motivated by the problems I see in the world,” Kutz says. “We’ve had this whole framework of moral philosophy that focused exclusively on individual harms and individual actions. After the Exxon Valdez and the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal, I realized that the most significant things, good or bad, that we do are things we do together. It’s hard to hurt that many people on your own.”

Pursuing a better theory of moral responsibility, his previous book focused on America’s wars in the Middle East, addressing our shared responsibility for causing harm. Publics in Action came in part from being a faculty member at Berkeley for decades.

“I’m used to people getting up and saying, ‘Well, it’s a public university, we have to do x.’ And then somebody else will say, ‘Well, as a public university, we can’t possibly do x,’ Kutz says. “And I realized that in arguing about what it means to be a public university, or for a thing to be public, people have very different ideas.”

Kutz also draws on personal experiences living in Europe and the U.S. In the latter, he sees “the absence of a commitment to public spaces and public institutions” — and a common notion that public institutions are a response to a private market failure. He came to believe that a strong regulatory state can make possible great infrastructure and great institutions, but it doesn’t have to be only through state-managed enterprises.

Writing part of his book during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kutz also dialed into that period’s longing for public engagement — especially while attending many live music shows, including a lot of jazz — which supplies the organizing metaphor for his book: the public as improvisation.

“Improvisation is, I think, familiar to anybody who’s helped to run a business or tried to create an organization,” he says. “You have ideas, you try them out. Some of them work, some of them don’t. You’ve got new people, new resources. So improvisation is everywhere.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw

Honors Spotlight:

Valued Across the Legal Terrain

Sought-after leaders and pathbreaking scholars, Berkeley Law’s faculty move the needle in myriad ways.
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team of scholars including Professor Jonah B. Gelbach is one of two recipients of the National Civil Justice Institute’s 2026 Civil Justice Scholarship Award. Their University of Chicago Law Review article “Sheddling Light on Secret Settlements: An Empirical Study of California’s STAND Act” analyzed California’s ban on secrecy in sexual-misconduct settlements and the effects of restricting non-disclosure agreements, finding that restricting secret settlements had little impact on the number of case filings or the litigation’s complexity or length.

A candid photograph of a young woman with wavy brown hair giving a presentation at a podium
SAVVY STRATEGIST: Berkeley Center for Law and Business Executive Director Angeli Patel ’20 gains new honors for her work. Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small
David A. Carrillo J.D. ’95, LL.M. ’07, J.S.D. ’11, executive director of the school’s California Constitution Center, is the new editor-in-chief of California Legal History. The annual journal publishes scholarly articles and oral histories of California judges and attorneys. Carrillo has coauthored a casebook on California constitutional law, teaches courses on the state’s constitution and Supreme Court, and runs a blog that covers the court. He has also served on the California Law Review Commission since 2019 and chaired it in 2022-23.

Berkeley Center for Law & Technology Executive Director Wayne Stacy was named to the IAM Strategy 300: The World’s Leading Intellectual Property Strategists for 2025. The honor underscores his stellar contributions to the field and ongoing engagement with the practical side of legal strategy, advancing approaches that maximize the value of IP portfolios. Former director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Western Regional Outreach Office, Stacy was regularly named one of the nation’s top patent litigators over his 20-plus years working at law firms.

Professor Ayelet Shachar became the first woman and youngest scholar to win the American Political Science Association’s Migration and Citizenship Section’s Career Achievement Award, which honors outstanding scholarship, teaching, or professional service that has advanced the understanding of migration and/or citizenship in political life. The award citation praised how “her considerable corpus of published work has influenced every corner of our field” and “managed to shift the scholarly paradigms we use to understand big questions about migration, citizenship, and belonging.”

Professor Catherine Fisk ’86 received the Miller Award at the 2025 Colloquium on Scholarship in Employment and Labor Law, which honors those who have shown outstanding academic and public contributions to labor and employment scholarship. Co-founder and co-faculty director of Berkeley Law’s Center for Law and Work, a hub for cross-disciplinary scholarship, student engagement, and community involvement to address pressing and emerging labor and employment issues, Fisk has published over 100 articles and essays and is the author of several books.

Angeli Patel ’20, executive director of the school’s Berkeley Center for Law and Business, won three Stevie Awards for Women in Business, which recognize the achievements and positive contributions of female entrepreneurs, executives, and employees worldwide and the organizations they run. She received a Silver Stevie for Female Executive of the Year (government or nonprofit with 10 or fewer employees), a Bronze Stevie for Maverick of the Year, and a Bronze Stevie for Female Thought Leader of the Year (government or nonprofit in the United States). — Andrew Cohen

Research Spotlight:

Connecting AI Analysis, Policy, and Teaching

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aintaining a front-row seat to profound shifts fostered by Silicon Valley’s innovations, Professor Tejas N. Narechania sees technologies changing dramatically.

“One day we’re talking about internet access and network neutrality, then the next day we’re talking about NFTs,” he says. “And now we’re talking about AI.”

As each hot new idea grabs funders and headlines, Narechania delivers up-to-the-minute research and teaching while keeping his eye on the big picture: balancing incentives and structures that fuel innovation with making sure these new technologies are available to and work for everyone’s benefit.

Two recent works show his reach.

In “How to Save the Internet” (Berkeley Technology Law Journal), he and co-author Scott Shenker argue that the internet’s evolution has let the current system drift from its early principles of interconnectedness, generality, and neutrality in favor of an “Enhanced Internet.”

Concerned about big-industry players stifling innovation and hurting consumers, they propose revitalized technical standards — already being built by both researchers and developers. They also urge requiring interconnection among carriers and codifying the principle of net neutrality so that providers can’t refuse to transmit content in order to gain a competitive advantage.

Narechania and Shenker call for a new course “that preserves the performance benefits of the Enhanced Internet while safeguarding the principles that made the internet revolutionary in the first place.”

In “An Antimonopoly Approach to Governing Artificial Intelligence” (Yale Law & Policy Review), Narechania and co-author Ganesh Sitaraman highlight AI’s market concentration across many layers, asserting that key elements of AI infrastructure warrant regulation.

A professional researcher with a dark beard wearing a grey suit and tie focused on writing on a whiteboard
POINT OF VIEW: Professor Tejas N. Narechania has stayed at the forefront of the fast-moving tech law sector. Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small
While many companies create new AI tools and applications, Narechania says they’re “built on a handful of models” which rely on “a concentrated set of cloud computing infrastructure providers” that use microprocessing hardware “from a very narrow supply chain.”

This raises concerns about prices and quality, and worries that monopolists will make only marginal improvements while choking off innovations that could supplant their dominance.

“In other contexts we’ve developed a range of antimonopoly tools, such as tariffed pricing or nondiscrimination rules, to address the risks of concentration,” says Narechania, who worked at Microsoft before law school. “We should do the same in AI, especially because concentration in AI seems to be structural.”

Narechania saw the rulemaking process as Federal Communications Commission special counsel and as a clerk for two federal judges, including now retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. He also advised the Biden administration on questions of competition and AI and co-leads Berkeley Law’s Artificial Intelligence, Platforms, and Society Center.

With the White House pushing to ban state regulations of AI and California Gov. Gavin Newsom signing legislation to rein in some AI technologies, Narechania helps students navigate this fast-changing sector in his Regulated Digital Industries: Telecommunications Law & Policy for a Modern Era course.

“I love teaching this class,” he says. “Every time I teach it, I always have at least one moment where a student says something so brilliant and insightful that it changes my thinking about a specific policy problem or solution.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw

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