BCLT Faculty

Over the last two decades, Berkeley Law has focused on developing the world’s leading IP and technology program. And for the past 19 years, we have been ranked as the No. 1 IP program in the country. The Berkeley Center for Law & Technology is integral to this success. This type of sustained success can only be attributed to the quality and dedication of our faculty. We have 18 full-time law faculty focused on today’s critical technology-related issues. These faculty make up the directors of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. Their expertise covers a stunning breadth of topics— from patents to privacy to bioethics to computer crime to the use of technology in criminal cases. Together, their research has led to more than 100 publications over the past two years alone. Their focus on research is only rivaled by their dedication to teaching. Our faculty, for example, has published nine tech-focused textbooks that are currently used in schools across the country. They are superb classroom teachers.

Kenneth A. Bamberger

Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Professor of Law

Bamberger is an expert on government regulation and corporate compliance, especially with regard to issues of technology, free expression, and information privacy. In 2016, he and Professor Deirdre Mulligan were awarded the Privacy Leadership Award by the International Association of Privacy Professionals for their comparative study of privacy regimes and corporate privacy practices, Privacy on the Ground: Driving Corporate Behavior in the United States and Europe. His current work focuses on the governance of technology design to protect public values, the ways that digital platforms affect markets and consumers, and the meaning of cybersecurity.

Catherine Crump

Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic and Clinical Professor of Law

Crump’s work focuses on the application of First and Fourth Amendment principles to government use of new technologies, in particular to government surveillance. She has litigated cases in state and federal court and testified before state legislatures, Congress, and the European Parliament. Recent projects include a focus on street-level policing, including deployment of police body-worn cameras and the use of GPS tracking on youth in the juvenile justice system.

Catherine Fisk

Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law Fisk teaches courses on the law of work, and also on the legal profession and freedom of speech and association. She writes in the fields of labor and employment, employee-generated intellectual property, sociolegal history, and the legal profession. Professor Fisk has written several major works on employer-employee disputes over intellectual property, some of which won prizes from the American Historical Association and the American Society for Legal History. Her current research projects include a book on labor protest in the mid-twentieth century, and works on video game writers and how copyright law, antitrust law, and labor law structured the relations among dramatists and theater producers.

Chris Jay Hoofnagle

Teaching professor in the School of Law, with a dual appointment in the School of Information Hoofnagle is an expert in information privacy law and teaches about regulation of technology. Hoofnagle’s research focuses on identity theft, security breaches, and consumer perceptions and attitudes towards privacy laws. He has written extensively in the fields of information privacy, the law of unfair and deceptive practices, consumer law, and identity theft. Professor Hoofnagle is co-founder of the Privacy Law Scholars Conference.

Sonia Katyal

Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research Katyal’s scholarly work considers intellectual property, trademarks, trade secrecy, civil rights (including gender, race, and sexuality), LGBTQ rights, anti–discrimination, property theory, and innovation. Professor Katyal is the co-author of Property Outlaws (Yale University Press, 2010) (with Eduardo Peñalver), which studies the intersection between civil disobedience and innovation in property and intellectual property frameworks. In March of 2016, Professor Katyal was selected by U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker to be part of the inaugural U.S. Commerce Department’s Digital Economy Board of Advisors. William G. Simon Professor of Law

Kerr has written more than 65 law review articles, over 40 of which have been cited in judicial opinions (including eight in U.S. Supreme Court opinions). Professor Kerr has briefed and argued cases in the United States Supreme Court and three federal circuits and has testified six times before Congressional committees. In 2015, Chief Justice Roberts appointed Professor Kerr to serve on the Judicial Conference’s committee to review the Criminal Justice Act. After Circuit Court and Supreme Court clerkships, he served as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia and as a trial attorney in the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Peter S. Menell

Koret Professor of Law

Menell will be advising the USPTO on various patent policy and other intellectual property matters. Professor Menell served as one of the inaugural Edison Scholars in 2012-13. Reflecting his training in science and technology, economics, and law, Professor Menell’s research focuses principally on the role and design of intellectual property law with particular emphasis on the digital technology and content industries. He has written over 100 articles and 15 books. His current projects explore intellectual property case management, judiciary reform, the scope of patentable subject matter, design protection, music copyright protection, trade secret whistleblower immunity, and technological disruption and social justice. In 2016, he founded Clause 8 Publishing, which seeks to promote the creation and dissemination of educational resources at fair prices.

Robert P. Merges

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Advanced Degree Programs and Global Engagement Merges is the author of Justifying Intellectual Property, published by Harvard University Press in 2011. A comprehensive statement of mature views on the ethical and economic foundations of IP law, the book reviews foundational philosophical theories of property and contemporary theories about distributive justice and applies them to IP; identifies operational high-level principles of IP law; and works through several pressing problems facing IP law today. Professor Merges also has undertaken extensive revisions to two of the casebooks he coauthors, to update them in light of the America Invents Act.

Mulligan’s research explores legal and technical means of protecting values such as privacy, freedom of expression, and fairness in emerging technical systems. Her current work explores the legal and policy implications of using predictive machine learning tools in different contexts, from legal discovery, to content moderation, to healthcare. She co-organizes the Algorithmic Fairness & Opacity Working Group, centering human values in the design and use of technical systems to support more equitable and just societies. In 2017, Professor Mulligan was appointed to a three-year term as a member of DARPA’s Information Science and Technology Study Group, the first lawyer on that body in its 30 year history. She was an inaugural member of the City of Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission; a founding board member of the Partnership for AI; a founding member of the Global Network Initiative; Chair Emeritus of the Board of Directors of the Center for Democracy & Technology; and the founding Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic.

Tejas N. Narechania

Robert and Nanci Corson Assistant Professor of Law

Narechania focuses on matters related to telecommunications regulation and intellectual property. Professor Narechania clerked for Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States (2015-2016) and for Judge Diane P. Wood of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (2011-2012). He has advised the Federal Communications Commission on network neutrality matters, where he served as Special Counsel (2012-2013). Professor Narechania’s research has appeared in the Columbia Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, and the Michigan Law Review, among other venues, and his work has been cited by the White House, in the work of the Supreme Court and the federal Courts of Appeals, as well as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Osagie K. Obasogie

Haas Distinguished Chair and Professor of Law at Berkeley Law with a joint appointment in the School of Public Health Obasogie’s scholarly interests include Constitutional law, policing and police use of force, sociology of law, bioethics, race and inequality in law and medicine, and reproductive and genetic technologies. His writings have spanned both academic and public audiences. His first book, Blinded By Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind (Stanford University Press), was awarded the Herbert Jacob Book Prize. His current work examines the role of science, medicine, and medical professionals in hindering the ability to hold police officers accountable when they use excessive force; analyzes the legacy of the American eugenics movement and its contemporary impact on law, science, medicine, and technology; studies how legal doctrine produces police violence; and exposes the limitations of DNA databases when they are used in criminal investigations.

Andrea Roth

Professor of Law

Before joining Berkeley Law, Roth worked as a trial and appellate attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (PDS) and a Thomas Grey Teaching Fellow at Stanford Law. She is currently the chair of the Legal Task Group of the National Institute on Standards and Technology’s Organization of Scientific Area Committees and was elected in 2021 to the American Law Institute. Her research focuses on the use of forensic science in criminal trials, the continuing viability of the lay jury, and the ways in which concepts of criminal procedure and evidentiary law must be re-theorized in an era of science-based prosecutions.

Pamela Samuelson

Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information

Much of Samuelson’s recent work has focused on updating and adapting U.S. copyright law to meet challenges of the digital age. She has written amicus curiae briefs as well as law review and other articles on major software IP cases such as Google v. Oracle. Professor Samuelson is co-foudner and board member of Authors Alliance, a nonprofit organization that represents the interests of authors who want their works to be widely available for the public good. She is Chair of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as a Contributing Editor to Communications of the ACM, a computing professionals society.

Jefferson E. Peyser Professor of Law Schwartz’s scholarship focuses on how the law has sought to regulate and shape information technology. His most frequent areas of publication concern information privacy and data security. At present, Professor Schwartz is engaged in research into comparative privacy developments in the U.S. and the European Union, cloud computing, and the interplay between state and federal privacy law.

Erik Stallman

Associate Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic and Assistant Clinical Professor Before joining the Samuelson Clinic, Stallman was a policy counsel at Google, focusing on copyright and telecommunications policy. He spent the previous 12 years in Washington D.C. working for the Federal Communications Commission, the U.S. House of Representatives, the law firm Steptoe & Johnson LLP, and then serving as General Counsel and Director of the Open Internet Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology. His research interests include copyright and machine learning, music licensing, and the intersection of copyright and media regulation. Erik is a graduate of Berkeley Law.

Jennifer M. Urban

Clinical Professor of Law and the Director of Policy Initiatives for the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic Urban’s work considers how the legal, private-ordering, and social systems that govern technology interact with values such as free expression, access to knowledge, freedom to create or innovate, and privacy. With Joe Karaganis, Professor Urban conceived and directs The Takedown Project, a consortium of scholars studying takedown regimes around the world. Her recent research of the DMCA notice-and-takedown system with Karaganis and Brianna L. Schofield reveals notice-and-takedown’s importance to copyright holders, online service providers, and the online ecosystem, along with some weaknesses. Professor Urban’s recent paper with Mark Lemley shows that judges with more experience handling patent cases are more likely to rule for defendants.

Molly Shaffer Van Houweling

Harold C. Hohbach Distinguished Professor of Patent Law and IP and Associate Dean for J.D. Curriculum and Teaching Van Houweling’s teaching portfolio includes intellectual property, basic property law, and food law and policy. Much of Professor Van Houweling’s research focuses on copyright law’s implications for new information technologies (and vice versa). She often explores this and other intellectual property issues using theoretical and doctrinal tools borrowed from the law of tangible property. Professor Van Houweling is an Associate Reporter on the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Copyright, and an Adviser to the Restatement of the Law Fourth, Property. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Authors Alliance and Chair of the Board of Creative Commons.

Rebecca Wexler

Assistant Professor of Law

Wexler focuses on evidence law, criminal procedure, privacy, and intellectual property protections surrounding new datadriven criminal justice technologies. Before joining Berkeley Law, Professor Wexler clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. She worked as a Yale Public Interest Fellow at The Legal Aid Society’s criminal defense practice and as a Lawyer-in-Residence at The Data and Society Research Institute.