News

UC Berkeley Professor of Law Khiara M. Bridges will be keynote speaker at UC Davis School of Law’s Class of 2024 commencement on Friday, May 10.

On April 26, the University of Northumbria's Centre for Evidence and Criminal Justice Studies will host a program on legal advice (attorney-client) privilege and litigation privilege (work product immunity). The presenters will include faculty members from Cambridge University, King's College London, Newcastle University, and Northumbria University. 

Professor Shayak Sarkar examines the structure and legal regulation of inequality by studying financial regulation, employment law, immigration, and taxation. His far-ranging education includes a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University; a J.D. from Yale Law School; two master’s degrees from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, in Economics for Development and Evidence-based Social Intervention; a master’s in statistics from Harvard University; and a bachelor’s from Harvard in applied mathematics. He was also a law clerk to Hon. Guido Calabresi, U.S.

UC Davis ranks No. 2 historically in student diversity, according to the new Northwestern Pritzker School of Law paper “Affirmative Action and Racial Diversity in U.S. Law Schools, 1980-2021.”

The paper by New York University Professor Richard R.W. Brooks, Northwestern Law Professor Kyle Rozema and Yale Law Professor Sarath Sanga studies racial diversity in American law schools and the impact of state-level affirmative action bans.

On March 22, the Center for Innovation, Law, and Society (CILS) and the California International Law Center (CILC) hosted Members of the European Parliament for a Transatlantic Tech Exchange Roundtable. The German Marshall Fund and UC Davis School of Law co-sponsored this important event.  While the U.S. and Europe face similar challenges concerning emerging innovations and digital technologies, European legal and policy solutions are often different from those in the United States.

In an April 1 opinion piece in The Hill, Professor Eric Fish writes about how, under the First Step Act, FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried likely will spend less than 60% of his 25-year sentence for fraud and conspiracy charges in federal prison.

Professor Donna Shestowsky won three prestigious awards for her stellar work in alternative dispute resolution.

The Advisory Committee Notes to the Federal Rules of Evidence cite two treatises, McCORMICK ON EVIDENCE and WIGMORE, EVIDENCE, more frequently than any other authorities on Evidence law. For the past three editions, Professor Ed Imwinkelried has been one of the major contributors to McCORMICK. One of the chapters Imwinkelried authored is the chapter devoted to the admissibility of expert opinion testimony.

David Sandino will direct UC Davis School of Law’s Water Justice Small Farmer Clinic, an extension of the law school’s Aoki Water Justice Clinic. The new clinic will launch in July 2024.

Professor Amelia Miazad spoke to the New York Times for a March 6 story on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s approval of rules for companies to reveal climate risks. The rules were far less strict than first proposed, the Times reports.

On the March 8 episode of the New York Times’ The Ezra Klein Show podcast, Professor Mary Ziegler discussed how conservative and progressive states have diverged since Roe v. Wade was overturned.

On Feb. 23-24, UC Davis Law hosted the California LAW Pathways ninth annual Pathway to Law Summit.

This year, Cal LAW celebrated its 10th anniversary of bringing together law professionals, students, and educators to connect and advance diversity and inclusion within law schools and the legal field.

Thirty-two talented teams from the Class of 2026 participated in the 17th UC Davis Law Intraschool Negotiations Competition, held March 2 at King Hall.

Congratulations to winning teams Nicole Larson and Olivia Shaw and Artem Borysyuk and Michael Yoakam, and to finalist teams Ramanjit Kaur and Sabrina Duvall and Lexi Vitangcol and Victoria Wong.

Professor of Law Irene Oritseweyinmi Joe is a 2023-24 UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow and the winner of the 2024 UC Davis School of Law Distinguished Teaching Award. Professor Joe applies her experience as a former New Orleans public defender to her research into the design of the criminal process and its impact on public defenders’ ability to manage overwhelming caseloads and comply with ethical requirements. She joined the UC Davis Law faculty in 2016 and teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Professional Responsibility, Comparative Criminal Justice, and Voir Dire.

Maxwell Davis ’25 and Aeman Shahbaz ’25 placed first at the regional ABA Client Counseling Competition held Feb. 16-18 at the University of Oregon School of Law. The pair will compete in the national finals March 15-16 at Louisiana State University.

In a Feb.

Professor Courtney Joslin spoke to Law360 for a Feb. 13 article on discrimination against employees based on marital status.

Many employers will not offer benefits to partners of unmarried employees, Joslin told Law360, and “the denial of these protections can impede a person’s ability to care for their families and family members.”

Professor Chimène Keitner wrote an expansive Jan. 16 article and a Jan.

On Wednesday, Feb. 21 the UC Davis Law Students Association (LSA) hosted a mixer with the UC Davis Department of Political Science. At the event, undergraduate political science students learned about pursuing a career in law.

Professor Christopher Elmendorf appeared on KQED’s Forum radio program on Feb. 15 to discuss San Jose’s efforts to move from car-heavy sprawl to denser, more walkable neighborhoods.

Professor Karrigan Börk will receive the Morrison Prize from Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law for his 2023 Harvard Environmental Law Review article “Water Right Exactions.”

On Feb. 9, Professor Lisa R. Pruitt gave a talk titled “The Racial Politics of Demon Copperhead” during a panel discussion of  author Barbara Kingsolver’s 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Demon Copperhead. The panel was part of the ClassCrits Conference at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles.

Professor Darien Shanske spoke to Bloomberg Tax for a Feb. 5 story about Republican-backed states’ legal challenges to restrictions on using pandemic relief funds for tax cuts.

Professor Darien Shanske told the Tennessee Journal on Jan. 30 that Tennessee’s  franchise tax issue is “not a hard problem to fix,” and would not require the $1 million to $1.4 million price tag Gov. Bill Lee’s administration has projected.