Constitutional and Administrative Law Scholarship and Impact

UC Law SF faculty are leading voices on a range of constitutional law issues, including free speech, separation of powers, the constitutional dimensions of agency administration, due process, equal protection, and criminal procedure.

Recent News | Selected Scholarship | Public Engagement | Faculty

Recent News

New Faculty

Kate Weisburd joins the UC Law San Francisco faculty from George Washington University School of Law, where students voted her professor of the year. Kate’s articles, which focus on intersections of criminal and constitutional law, have appeared in the Virginia, California, and UCLA Law Reviews, among others, and have won multiple peer-conferred awards.

Prithika Balakrishnan, who was previously the C. Keith Wingate Visiting Professor at UC Law San Francisco, has joined the faculty full time. She previously was a federal public defender, union organizer, and Peace Corps volunteer. Her article Mass Surveillance as Racialized Control Recently was published in UCLA Law Review.

UC Law SF Professors Secure Supreme Court Victory for Federal Employee Rights

Center for Litigation and Courts Director and Distinguished Professor Scott Dodson wrote the winning case briefs while CLC Research Professor Joshua Davis argued live before the Court’s nine justices in Washington, D.C. The result was a unanimous opinion in favor of their client, Stuart Harrow.

Arguments by Profs. Emily Murphy, Matt Coles Cited in SCOTUS Case on Expert Testimony

In a case challenging whether experts can opine on a defendant’s likely mental state, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson penned a concurring opinion citing arguments co-written by Professors Emily Murphy and Matt Coles along with University of Utah Law Professor Teneille Brown.

Selected Scholarship

In Search of the Public Interest empirically studies agency implementation of in-the-public-interest standards. Jodi Short finds that actual practices are quite different from prevailing hopes and fears.

Major Questions about Presidentialism: Untangling the ‘Chain of Dependence’ Across Administrative Law by Jodi Short explains how the Supreme Court’s view of the presidency in appointment and removal cases is inconsistent with its view in major-questions-doctrine cases.

Dave Owen’s article The Negotiable Implementation of Environmental Law explores government agencies’ use of negotiation as a regulatory strategy and was chosen by the Environmental Law and Policy Annual Report as one of the top policy-relevant environmental-law articles of 2022-23.

The Water District and the State by Dave Owen explains how water districts use problematic and undemocratic governance structures and how state intervention might help.

Could impacts on cognitive capacity be a better way to measure the value of regulatory proposals? Emily Murphy has explored this question in a series of recent articles, including Collective Cognitive Capital.

Zach Price’s book Constitutional Symmetry: Judging in a Divided Republic is hot off the press. The book addresses how judges can develop fair and respected legal standards even in a time of political polarization.

Public Engagement

Ming Hsu Chen spent last year serving as a Public Voices Fellow. She used her fellowship to write on important questions at the intersections of immigration and administrative law.

Dorit Reiss is a leading legal scholar and frequent speaker on vaccine regulation. Her recent articles have appeared in JAMA, the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, and the American Journal of Public Health, among others, and she’s contributed to factual understanding through media engagements.