BRITTANY HOSEA-SMALL
ROAD TO RENEWAL: Berkeley Technology Law Journal Senior Executive Editor Harrison Geron ’21 and Editor-in-Chief Emma Lee ’21.
CLAW letting students, practitioners, and academics access all the work happening in the field at Berkeley Law. “Having permanent faculty representation to help guide, shape, and synthesize that work will help institutionalize employment and labor law advocacy,” he says. “This gives students a complete view of what their path would look like if they go in this direction. It opens up so many opportunities.” The center’s first event, a symposium on how to reform policing through changing labor relations, took place Jan. 29. Eminent voices on all sides of the debate addressed the challenge of achieving meaningful reform while police unions wield great influence over law enforcement agencies and the politicians who oversee them. CLAW’s faculty leaders are leading scholars who inhabit different spheres of employment and labor law. Edelman examines how organizations are influenced by their legal environments; Fisk focuses on unions, workers’ rights movements, and the First Amendment; and Albiston examines gender, discrimination, and family and medical leave laws. “We want our students, faculty, and campus to be at the forefront of drafting these new policies and understanding the intricacies of the new labor market,” Albiston says. “And we especially want to be sure we’re taking into account the needs of all workers.” Fisk says workers’ rights draws many students to Berkeley Law, and that the school offers some of the best empirical and policy-oriented research in California and the nation. “Berkeley is poised to be a thought leader on the law and policy solutions to these problems,” she says. “We needed an organized way to harness the scholarly resources that are already here, to connect to the huge alumni network in this area, and to incubate ideas.” —Gwyneth K. Shaw
Ready, Tech, Action Eyeing solutions, students push to make technology law an engine for anti-racism work
As the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and other Black people pushed America’s long-simmering relationship with racial justice to a boil last summer, student leaders of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal saw an overdue area for advancing social change. The result — “Technology Law as a Vehicle for AntiRacism,” a two-day virtual symposium in November — aimed higher than just igniting a conversation. Co-hosted by the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT) and open to all, the event sought to stoke flames of action. The many ways tech-based tools can adversely affect people of color is an emerging hot topic, from concerns about the biases of pretrial algorithms to reports that the software used to administer remote bar exams failed to recognize a dark-skinned face. “It’s a great time to address how technology, which has taken over so many aspects of our lives, intersects with very special considerations of race and how racial minorities are affected by new technologies in distinct ways,” says Allan E. Holder ’21 (see page 26), chief symposium organizer and the journal’s senior online content editor.
Berkeley Law Transcript Spring 2021 13
