UC Berkeley School of Law

As AI increasingly shapes legal practice, Berkeley Law has a new course starting this fall aimed at educating students about the technology’s strengths and weaknesses while giving them more than 100 hours of hands-on training.

Taught by Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT) Executive Director Wayne Stacy — a former Big Law litigator and U.S. Patent Office leader — AI and the Practice of Law: Public Interest & Private Practice will focus on enhancing legal skills without lowering the threshold for human judgment and input.

“This is the fundamental question: How are you going to do higher quality legal work with AI than you’re going to do by yourself?” Stacy asks. “It’s not just being faster and cheaper. The jump in the quality of work, in the creativity for your client, is the difference. That’s what I want my students to learn.”

Read the full article: https://bit.ly/4uuIGEp

Rising 3L Anchita Dasgupta is the incoming co-editor-in-chief of the Berkeley Journal of International Law and co-president of the International Arbitration Association and International Law Society. She came to Berkeley Law with a longstanding interest in the history of international law and the practice of sovereign-state representation before international courts and tribunals, and before law school read for a Masters in Philosophy in Law at Oxford where she studied the role of non-legal actors in developing canonical doctrines of international humanitarian law.

At Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Clinic this past year, Dasgupta worked as a legal advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-terrorism and Human Rights, Ben Saul, and UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria member Finnuala Ní Aoláin. She spent her 1L summer as a legal intern at the Office of the Prosecutor at the UN International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague, and was a legal intern at the U.S.-based human rights nonprofit Center for Justice and Accountability last semester.

Dasgupta discusses her summer work as an assistant at the 77th session of the International Law Commission in Geneva in the full article: https://bit.ly/3S7sWtz

Geetika Jerath ’19 went to law school planning to advise entrepreneurs — and ended up becoming one.

“I thought my impact would come from advising founders who were building the next big thing,” she says. “As it turned out, Berkeley Law gave me the education, the experience, and the courage that I’d eventually use to build a company with my co-founder.”

That company, rubi, is helping to reshape how a new generation of lawyers is trained.

Read "Geetika Jerath ’19 Turns Big Law Experience Into Training Platform for Junior Lawyers" https://bit.ly/4em1n8x

Professor David Oppenheimer and a group of J.D. and undergraduate Legal Studies students recently submitted an intervention — the European term for an amicus brief — in a case against the nation of Georgia now before the European Court of Human Rights.

Working with a feminist organization in Georgia and the Equality Law Clinic at the Free University of Brussels, the group wrote a brief on behalf of a woman who had been charged with defamation after accusing her supervisor of sexual harassment.

“It’s a common problem around the world,” says Oppenheimer, who leads the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law and is also the co-faculty director of Berkeley Law’s Pro Bono Program. He wrote a brief, again with students, in a similar case before the Supreme Court of Japan in 2021. His most recent book, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘗𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘦: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘢 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘐𝘥𝘦𝘢, was published earlier this year.

Read "Professor, Students Urge European Court of Human Rights to Adopt American Defamation Standard" https://bit.ly/4vsK9w8