The Edley Center begins the new academic year with the publication of a new white paper and a busy fall of planned events. As the democracy crisis intensifies in the United States, we are redoubling our efforts.

Senior Fellow Melissa Hooper’s Subverting the Judiciary: A Guide to Autocratic Attacks on Judicial Independence positions the proliferation of attacks on judges who rule against the President as familiar components of an autocratic playbook, situating the contemporary U.S. experience in international context. Hooper assembles the dismissive language the President and senior administration officials and allies use to denigrate federal judges – as “marxist” or “communist” “lapdogs” who are “fools” and “disgrace our country,” among other terms used as slurs – and describes their harmful impact along with other coordinated attacks on the integrity of judges and the judicial process. The white paper describes how targeting judges in these ways invites dangerous physical attacks on the judges and undermines public confidence in the judiciary’s independence and effectiveness. Importantly, the white paper concludes by noting that democracy defenders and judges themselves have available means for shoring up the independence of the judiciary as well as public confidence in independent courts and describes ways we can contribute to trust building to re-envision the functioning of courts.

We will initiate the fall term at Berkeley Law with a major symposium on August 28, titled Fight Back: How States Can Counter Authoritarianism. This iteration of our annual Thomas David and Judith Swope Clark Symposium on Constitutional Interpretation will feature a keynote conversation between our Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown as well as two expert panels discussing untapped authorities states and local governments can use to advance freedom and equality. The panels will describe the constitutional authority of states to use muscular state powers to protect their residents, with specific recommendations for creating safety net programs, better safeguarding data, using tax authorities, protecting residents’ fundamental rights, and ensuring and safeguarding equal protection under law for state residents. The symposium will also highlight city powers to force the federal government to bear the significant cost of its own policies rather than devolving the costs to cities as well as city powers to rally public opinion against concrete harms of federal actions. 

The stellar roster of speakers will include Brian Galle and Catherine Lhamon from Berkeley Law, Fred O. Smith, Jr. and Jennifer Chacón from Stanford Law, Steven Kochevar from University of Chicago Law School, Matthew Lawrence from Emory Law, Rachel Rebouché from University of Texas at Austin School of Law, Justin Weinstein-Tull from the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State, and Jill Habig, who is the founder and CEO of Public Rights Project, as well as Amrit Mehra, a government affairs consultant. We welcome participation in our event; you may register for this symposium using this link: Fight Back: How States Can Counter Authoritarianism - RSVP.

The remainder of the fall will be equally exciting. We plan to hold a second parallel version of the Fight Back symposium on September 25 at the UC in DC location, with a second stellar set of panelists speaking broadly to the same topic of how states can counter authoritarianism. With elections soon to come, we also will convene panels on election law in September. In October, we will co-host with the Goldman School of Public Policy a book talk from Tim Heaphy, former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia and lead investigator for the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. He will discuss his new book We Are the Answer: How to Save Our Democracy. And on October 30, we will co-host a Berkeley-wide summit titled America at 250: Reimagining Who We Are. This event will mark the 250^th anniversary of the United States by examining how we can build and sustain a country that truly secures life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. 

We will share information for all these events in the coming weeks. We hope you will attend. 

Finally, we are thrilled to welcome back to Berkeley the Edley Center’s faculty codirector Bertrall Ross, who has supported the Center’s growth and productivity together with faculty codirector Dan Farber.

We look forward to more work, together, to defend American democracy. 

Catherine E. Lhamon

Executive Director