We are excited to report that the University of Berkeley has approved Director Catherine Crump's tenure following the law school faculty's vote last year to recommend her promotion. Congratulations, Catherine!

Associate Director Erik Stallman and partner Rita Cant are pleased to announce the addition of daughter Alice Ren to their family. Congratulations, Erik and Rita. Welcome to the world, baby Alice!

We are delighted to announce the addition of two new teaching fellows to the clinic — Gabrielle Daley and Juliana DeVries ’17. Before joining us, Gabrielle (left), who was a student in the Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law & Policy Clinic at University of Colorado Law School, worked as an associate at Kissinger & Fellman focusing on municipal telecommunications. In law school she was a member of the Colorado Technology Law Journal and worked as a legal policy intern at Public Knowledge. Julie joins — or actually rejoins — the clinic, where she worked on a body camera project with the ACLU of Massachusetts as a student. Most recently, she was an assistant federal public defender for the Northern District of California, and clerked for a federal judge and a state judge.

Jennifer Urban assumed a new title as Director of Policy Initiatives last spring to better reflect the full-time clinic role she has been able to resume now that her health has improved. We are delighted to have Jennifer back!

Oakland’s city council voted unanimously last spring to adopt a set of privacy principles drafted by three clinic students, who wrote the privacy principles and guidance documents for the city. This lays a foundation for city staff to carefully consider decisions any time they use residents’ personal information when doing things like installing surveillance cameras, collecting data on students who miss school, or using automated license plate readers to log parking violations. Neighboring city Alameda has also adopted an almost identical set of principles, based on the students’ work. (Left to right: Nomi Conway '20, Courtney Reed '20, and Amisha Gandhi '20.)

Earlier this week, the clinic released a new report answering five important questions about the use of electronic monitoring of youth in the California juvenile justice system. The report, which Catherine co-authored with clinic alumna Amisha Gandhi '20, is a follow-up to a 2017 report issued by the clinic and the East Bay Community Law Center, looking at the electronic monitoring terms and conditions young people must follow while in California’s juvenile justice system. The new report demonstrates electronic monitoring technology is widespread in the California juvenile justice system, with some 90% of counties using the technology to track young people. Pre-Covid, some 10,000 young people were tracked each year. Most are subjected to house arrest. Some counties share all of the data they collect with law enforcement agencies.

In August, clinic students filed a petition for a new exemption to section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) on behalf of Authors Alliance to enable text and data mining research. Text and data mining allows researchers and others to gain new insights into language and culture, scientific inquiry, and civic participation. While the possibilities of text and data mining are great, researchers face limitations in their ability to use the technique because of restrictions of section 1201 of the DMCA. The proposed exemption would allow researchers to bypass digital rights management measures in order to conduct text and data mining research on both electronically published literary works and motion pictures. Further details can be found in the full text of the petition. If this exemption is granted, researchers will be empowered to build relevant collections and conduct this important research.

Clinic faculty sent a letter to the community last summer affirming their commitment to racial justice.

Director Catherine Crump along with Ken White, writes that the Federal Bureau of Prisons should end its unjust policy of requiring inmates to “voluntarily” waive privilege in emails they send to their attorneys through the bureau-provided email system.

The clinic celebrated a Supreme Court ruling in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org that Georgia cannot claim copyright protection for its annotated legal code. The clinic had filed an amicus brief on behalf of four library associations, arguing that the government edicts doctrine (which establishes that the law is in the public domain) is crucial to libraries’ mission.

In January, the clinic and Professor Pamela Samuelson filed an amicus brief in the Google v. Oracle software copyright case on behalf of 72 intellectual property scholars. The brief argued that copyright law does not protect software interfaces that enable the development of compatible programs. The case was argued in October.

In June, Jennifer Urban gave a talk, “Covid-19, App-Based Contact Tracing, and Surveillance Policy,” discussing how the Covid-19 emergency relates to rules governing surveillance and location-based tracking, whether anonymized contact notification can be effective, secure, and privacy preserving, and whether existing rules should change to address the emergency.

In August, Director Catherine Crump answered questions on the pitfalls of Ring doorbells and explained the technological legal implications of these consumer surveillance devices.

Lila Bailey '00 is policy counsel for the Internet Archive. The Washington, D.C.-based digital rights advocacy group Public Knowledge recognized her as this year's winner of the IP3 Award for her "significant contributions to technology and tech policy in the category of Intellectual Property." Past winners of this honor include Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle and Professor Pam Samuelson. Watch her acceptance speech.

Brianna Schofield '12 is the executive director of Authors Alliance. She is delighted to be working with students and faculty at the Samuelson Clinic this semester to advance two projects. The first team is developing resources to help authors navigate the legal issues that may arise when writing about real people. The second team is petitioning the U.S. Copyright Office for an exemption to anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA to enable text and data mining research.

Rob Walker is working as legal counsel at New Relic, Inc., a software-as-a-service company that provides observability tools to software developers. Second, he is an adjunct professor at U.C. Hastings where he teaches a course in video game law.

Kristy Murphy has been practicing commercial litigation at the Los Angeles office of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP for the last 13 years, focusing her practice in the area of franchise litigation. She is a certified legal specialist in Franchise and Distribution Law by the State Bar of California and represents both franchisors and franchisees in a variety of industries that use franchising as a method of distribution.

Robert Esposito is technology and product counsel at Hillspire, LLC, which is the family office of Eric and Wendy Schmidt. One of the Schmidt entities, Schmidt Futures, is a foundation that supports a variety of programs with entrepreneurs and academics, spanning topics such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and robotics. The foundation focuses on projects that have the potential to achieve scientific breakthroughs, have social impact, or transform society through technology.

Mike Burshteyn is at Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco working on CCPA, TCPA, and other technology, privacy, and security litigation and investigation matters. Before that, Mike was the founder/CEO at CryptoMove, a data security startup in Oakland commercializing a technology that Mike’s dad invented — fragmenting and moving data around continuously with re-encryption for security. He recently joined the Bay Area Urban Debate League (democratizing high school debate in the Bay Area) board of directors. Kid #2 is on the way in January 2021.

Ana Enriquez is a copyright librarian at Penn State University. She teaches about copyright, helps researchers make their work open access, and advocates for copyright policy improvements to benefit educational institutions (hello, triennial 1201 rulemaking and sovereign immunity study!). In addition to answering copyright questions for online classes at Penn State, she’s worked with many preK-12 teachers and public librarians this year who are experiencing copyright’s chilling effects as they teach and work online. Outside of work, she’s been gardening a lot and enjoying the Home Cooking podcast.

Jaideep Reddy successfully represented the Internet and Mobile Association of India in an Indian Supreme Court case challenging the constitutional basis of a central bank restriction on virtual currencies. The Indian Supreme Court, in perhaps the first apex court judgment worldwide on the issue, set aside the restriction as unconstitutional and recognized the right of virtual currency exchanges to have access to banking channels. Jaideep is also involved in various access-to-legal-information initiatives in India.

Meghan Fenzel is an associate at Fenwick & West LLP where she focuses on litigation, appeals, and counseling related to intellectual property, privacy, and media law. She welcomed her second child just as California entered lockdown and looks forward to seeing family, friends, and colleagues in person again soon.

George Laiolo is a litigation associate at the San Francisco office of Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders LLP. He works on a variety of business litigation matters, but most recently moved to compel the online platform known as Reddit to reveal the identity of a Reddit user responsible for defaming and interfering with the business of one of his clients. The motion required navigation of the interplay between the First Amendment's protection of anonymous speech and California litigants' broad right to discover relevant information.

Amanda Almeda graduated in May and just finished taking the California Bar Exam. She will soon be starting work at Hinshaw & Culbertson on their products liability team.

Samantha Hamilton is the 2020-2021 legal fellow in the First Amendment Clinic at the University of Georgia School of Law. Since the clinic’s inception, Sam and clinic students have litigated against a public official who blocked a constituent on social media, written several letters appealing denials of public records requests, and led media law trainings for student journalists at universities across Georgia.

Thank you to the Clinical Program staff! We are always very thankful for the help and support of the Clinical Program staff, but during this challenging time are particularly grateful for the outstanding efforts of Director of Administration Amy Utstein, Legal Case Manager Olivia Layug Balbarin, Office Manager Jeanette Ching, and Communications and Development Officer Sarah Weld (left to right, Sarah, Olivia, Amy, and Jeanette). They keep us on track and make sure the faculty and students have the tools they need to do their best work. Thanks for everything you do, Amy, Olivia, Jeanette, and Sarah.

We are extremely grateful for your support of the Samuelson Clinic over the years. You have helped us as students, alumni, faculty members, and friends. The clinic has a large and welcoming community because of all of you. Thank you!

If you’re looking for new ways to continue your involvement (or to get involved again), we’ve got a few ideas.

Our students appreciate meeting and talking to our alumni about their careers. If you’re up for connecting with a student or two for virtual coffee, email Gabrielle Daley. Video conferencing platforms make it easier than ever to connect over a hot beverage and share your experiences with our students no matter where you are located.

We value our clients a great deal and strive to do excellent work for them. But you may not know that we’re always on the lookout for awesome new clients and project ideas. If you come across an issue or organization you think is ripe for a clinic project, let us know.

From time to time, the clinic needs outside support on a project. Whether that’s getting something filed in court, preparing for argument, conducting research, or connecting with others who could lend a hand (or knowledge) to a project, let us know if you’d like to help out.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t pitch you one more time for financial support. If you’d like to make a donation, click here to give online, or send a check payable to:

"UC Foundation/Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic”

Mail to:

Berkeley Law c/o University of California, Berkeley Gift Services

1995 University Avenue, Suite 400

Berkeley, CA 94704-1070

We genuinely appreciate all of the contributions you have made to the success of the Samuelson Clinic over the years and we look forward to many more exciting opportunities in the future. If we ever make it back on campus, and you’re there, be sure to stop by to say hello!