Federal Courts in Context

Fred Smith

Fred Smith Jr. is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University. He is a scholar of the federal judiciary, constitutional law, and local government. In 2019, 2022, and 2023, he was named the law school’s Outstanding Professor of the Year.

Smith clerked for Judge Myron Thompson of the Middle District of Alabama; Judge Barrington D. Parker Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; and Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Supreme Court. Prior to teaching, he also worked for Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore LLP in Atlanta.

Smith's research focuses on accountability, federal jurisdiction, and state sovereignty. His work has appeared, or will appear, in Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, Michigan Law Review, New York University Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, and Vanderbilt Law Review, among other academic journals. He has given lectures on related topics across the United States and internationally, including in Istanbul, Shanghai, and Warsaw. He also has been interviewed as an expert by major media outlets, including CNN, CBS News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Time Magazine, Esquire Magazine, Court TV, and National Public Radio.

Erwin Chemerinsky

Erwin Chemerinsky became the 13^th Dean of Berkeley Law on July 1, 2017, when he joined the faculty as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law.

Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law. Before that he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2008, and from 1983-2004 was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, including as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. From 1980-1983, he was an assistant professor at DePaul College of Law.

He is the author of sixteen books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. His most recent books are Worse than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism (September 2022) and Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights (2021).

He also is the author of more than 200 law review articles. He is a contributing writer for the Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times, and writes regular columns for the Sacramento Bee, the ABA Journal and the Daily Journal, and frequent op-eds in newspapers across the country. He frequently argues appellate cases, including in the United States Supreme Court.

In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017, National Jurist magazine again named Dean Chemerinsky as the most influential person in legal education in the United States. In 2022, he was the President of the Association of American Law Schools. He received his B.S. at Northwestern University and his J.D. at Harvard Law School.

Norman W. Spaulding

A nationally recognized scholar in the areas of professional responsibility, civil procedure, and federal courts, Norman W. Spaulding’s research concentrates on the history of the American legal profession and theories of adjudication. In 2014, he received the John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2010 he served as the Covington & Burling Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. And in 2004 the Association of American Law Schools presented him with its Outstanding Scholarly Paper Prize for &"Constitution as Counter-Monument: Federalism, Reconstruction and the Problem of Collective Memory,” published in the Columbia Law Review.

He is a member of the American Law Institute and the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2005, he was a professor of law at the UC Berkeley School of Law and an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, where he did environmental litigation. Professor Spaulding, JD ’97, served as a law clerk to Judge Betty B. Fletcher (BA ’43) of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Thelton Henderson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Seth Davis

Seth Davis is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. His research explores questions of sovereignty, responsibility, and redress as they arise in both public law and private law, focusing upon administrative law, the federal courts, federal Indian law, fiduciary law, and tort law. His scholarship has appeared in the Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, and the California Law Review, among other leading journals, and has been honored by the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). In addition, Davis is co-author of Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law, the leading treatise in the field. He has served on the Editorial Board of Law & Social Inquiry and as the Chair of the Federal Courts Section of the AALS. His media appearances and public commentary include National Public Radio, the Washington Post, and Vice News Tonight, and he is a co-author of D.C. Circuit Review – Reviewed at the Notice & Comment blog. An award-winning teacher, Davis has taught a wide range of first-year and upper-level courses.

Before joining the Berkeley Law community, Davis taught at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, and at Harvard Law School, where he was a Climenko Fellow. Prior to his academic career, Davis worked as an appellate litigator and provided regulatory counseling in the areas of financial services law, securities regulation, and political ethics at O’Melveny & Myers LLP, where he also developed an active pro bono practice. He clerked for the Honorable Douglas H. Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Davis received his J.D. from Columbia Law School, an MSc in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a B.A. from Davidson College.