News

May 8, 2023

Excessive Police Use of Force: Experts Push for Legal Solutions Focused on Training and Culture

A recent Berkeley Law symposium addressed excessive police use of force, highlighting the barriers victims face in accessing justice and the need for legal reforms to improve officer accountability. Experts emphasized the disproportionate impact on people of color and criticized judicial biases that hinder prosecutions of police misconduct. The event concluded with a call for stronger collaboration between law and medicine, and the establishment of a fellowship fund to support law students focused on police accountability and racial justice.

May 18, 2022

The Decline of the Civil Jury Trial: Implications for Trial Practice

Newsweek reports the decline of the civil jury trial over the past few decades. Professor Valerie Hans at Cornell Law School and her colleagues at Southwestern Law School and the Center for Constitutional Litigation suggest possible reasons including: the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure’s discouragement against jury trials, and Supreme Court’s approval for dispositive motions. In addition, the American Bar Association argues civil damage caps and the rise of mandatory arbitration as factors to the decline. From this trend, there are several implications noteworthy for trial practice; the pressure to settle a case and the backlog of cases (due to the pandemic) that may require such cases to be resolved without a jury.

September 9, 2021

Valerie Hans Co-Authors White Paper on Reviving the Civil Jury

May 14, 2021

How Justice Amy Coney Barrett Is Already Changing the Supreme Court

During a panel at the Northern District of California’s virtual conference, Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Melissa Murray of NYU School of Law outlined how the justice’s presence has shifted the high court’s institutional dynamics.

February 17, 2021

California's Shifting Relationship with the Supreme Court

CJRI Chair and Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky discusses what Californians can expect from the Supreme Court with the New York Times.

2024

William S. Dodge, Maggie Gardner, and Christopher A. Whytock win CJRI’s "Best Article Prize"

The Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative is pleased to announce that the winners of this year’s Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative’s Best article prize, are William Dodge (UC Davis), Maggie Gardner (Cornell Law) and Chistopher Whytock (UC Irvine) for “The Many State Doctrines of Forum Non Conveniens,” published in the February 2023 issue of the Duke Law Journal. The prize recognizes an important scholarly contribution to access to justice in the preceding year. This year’s prize-winning article pulls back the curtain on the historical myths surrounding the legal doctrine “forum non conveniens,” which allows judges to decline to hear a case submitted to their court on the grounds that the case would be more appropriately heard in another court. Dodge, Gardner, and Whytock demonstrate that the doctrine has only shallow roots in the practice of state courts and that the doctrine was not used to dismiss cases involving local parties until the 1950s.

2023

Maria Glover of Georgetown Law wins CJRI's "Best Article Prize"

The Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative is pleased to announce that the winner of this year’s Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative’s Best article prize, is Maria Glover of Georgetown Law for “Mass Arbitration,” published in the June 2022 issue of the Stanford Law Review. The prize recognizes an important scholarly contribution to access to justice in the preceding year. Glover’s article develops the first and only case study of Mass Arbitration and provides a taxonomy of the results. What emerges is not a variation on old themes but, instead, a new and distinct model of dispute resolution. The investigation reveals significant ways in which the Mass Arbitration model challenges conventional wisdom about individual claiming and provides new perspectives on the relationships among private procedural ordering, public procedural reform, and civil justice.

July 2022

Joanna Schwartz of UCLA Law wins CJRI’s “Best Article Prize”

The Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative is pleased to announce that the winner of this year’s Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative’s Best article prize, is Joanna Schwartz of UCLA Law for “Qualified Immunity’s Boldest Lie.” The prize recognizes an important scholarly contribution to access to justice in the preceding year. Professor Schwartz’s article combines heroic data collection efforts with a deep and thoughtful analysis of the implicit (and often incorrect) empirical assumptions at the foundation of the qualified immunity doctrine in the United States, which shields police officers and others, from liability for constitutional violations in many instances.