FACULTY AWARDS & HONORS

Recent Honors and Accolades

Our accomplished faculty members are widely known and respected, including across disciplines. Here are some of the ways they’ve been recognized this year.

OSAGIE K. OBASOGIE, Haas Distinguished Chair, Professor of Law and Bioethics:

2022 GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP

Obasogie won the prestigious fellowship to further his groundbreaking scholarship probing the intersection of race, medicine, and the law, and plans to use the opportunity to expand his work on “excited delirium,” a vague and controversial term often used by medical examiners and coroners to explain why community members die in police custody. His article examining how the condition is often tied to in-custody deaths was recently published in the Virginia Law Review. Obasogie was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2021.

As a sociologist of law and medicine, Obasogie combines doctrinal scholarship with empirical methods and novel theoretical approaches to understand the ways that race is central to how the institutions of law and medicine operate. He’s a core faculty member of Berkeley Law’s interdisciplinary Ph.D.-granting Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) Program, which has a long tradition of drawing social scientists from many fields together to train new generations of legal scholars, and a faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.IRVIJORDE SYMPOSIUM (co-hosted by the Calif

ABBYE ATKINSON, Class of 1965 Assistant Professor of Law:

AMERICAN CONSTITUTION SOCIETY RUTH BADER GINSBURG SCHOLAR AWARD

Atkinson’s research focuses on how debt — especially high-cost borrowing, such as payday loans — can further marginalize and impoverish already poor people and communities. Her work has been published in top journals, including the Stanford Law Review and Columbia Law Review, and last year she testified before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee last year about credit, debt, and the widening racial and gender gap. Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky calls her work “truly pathbreaking in looking at the effect of the law, and particularly consumer law, on those who are economically struggling.”

She’s the first recipient of the award named for the late Supreme Court justice, which recognizes “an outstanding scholar in the early stages of their academic career who has demonstrated those qualities exemplified by Justice Ginsburg: scholarly excellence, the ability to imagine how society might be more just and more equal, and the determination to use the law and one’s scholarship to creatively and strategically make the imagined real.” LAUREN EDELMAN, Agnes Roddy Robb Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology:

ELECTED TO THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

Edelman, a past president of the Law and Society Association and Guggenheim Fellowship winner, confronts the interplay between organizations and their legal environments in her scholarship. She’s also a core member of the JSP faculty and a cofaculty director of our Center for Law and Work.

ANDREA L. ROTH, Professor of Law:

ELECTED TO THE AMERICAN LAW INSTITUTE

A noted criminal law expert whose work focuses on how pedigreed concepts of criminal procedure and evidentiary law work in prosecutions that are increasingly science-based, Roth was also appointed to chair the Legal Task Group of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Organization of Scientific Area Committees for Forensic Science. Roth is also a faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.

CALVIN MORRILL, Stefan A. Riesenfeld Professor of Law and Sociology: LAW & SOCIETY

ASSOCIATION STAN WHEELER MENTORSHIP AWARD

Morrill, whose research addresses questions of social conflict and change, focusing on dispute resolution, legal mobilization, organizational and cultural dynamics, social movements, school rights, and immigrant entrepreneurial activity, is also a driving force in the JSP Program. He’s served on 44 Ph.D. supervisory committees, chairing over half of them, and many of the students he’s mentored have themselves gone on to accomplished careers in academia.

ROBERT P. MERGES, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Professor of Law: PATCON

EXTRAORDINARY ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

Merges, the second-most cited intellectual property scholar according to a recent study, was recognized for his contributions to scholarship about the patent system by the world’s largest annual gathering for scholars in the field to share their research with other experts and explore new developments. He’s also a faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.