Dean Erwin Chemerinsky Offers Our Annual Supreme Court "Class"

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the Supreme Court’s recent rulings, both in formal cases and in response to the 20 emergency applications the Trump administration filed in the President’s second term. The Court ruled in his favor in a string of these, including cases involving immigration, transgender troops, and the independence of government agencies. Finally, the Court largely eliminated the power of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions.

On Wednesday, October 8, Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky returns to Arts & Culture to review the norm-breaking last term of the Supreme Court and to discuss the important cases on its docket for the coming one. He also will preview his timely next book, Campus Speech and Academic Freedom: A Guide for Difficult Times, co-authored with Howard Gillman, the Chancellor of UC Irvine, and due out in January. [Note the change from the first to the second Wednesday!]

Tickets for this program are $5 for club members and students and $10 for non-members. We expect a large audience for Dean Chemerinsky’s talk, so please register early so we can be sure to accommodate everyone comfortably. 

Arguably, the Court’s most momentous recent decision came in Trump vs. CASA. By 6-3, the Justices held that federal district courts cannot issue nationwide injunctions. Dean Cherminsky calls this ruling “a grievous blow to separation of powers … At a time when President Trump is asserting unprecedented powers, the court made it far more difficult to restrain his unconstitutional actions.”

When the Supreme Court reconvenes in October, it will consider more highly-charged issues. These include cases with significant implications for transgender athletes, voting rights, campaign-finance laws, and the death penalty. 

Since Dean Chemerinsky last spoke at the City Club, the American Bar Foundation gave him the Outstanding Scholar Award for 2025. The honor recognized his

“exceptional contributions to the legal field, which have had wide-reaching impacts inside and outside academia and set a high standard, both for scholars engaged with the legal community and for public discourse.”

Also this year, Dean Chemerinsky co-founded “We Hold These Truths,” an effort to educate the public about constitutional democracy, with former U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig and Drexel Law Professor Lisa Tucker. They recruited politicians, veterans, lawyers, judges, law professors, and other leaders to draft what they believe are the five pillars of American democracy: personal freedoms, equality, democracy and elections, rule of law, and separation of powers. The project launched on July 4 with full-page ads in several national and regional newspapers and an op-ed by Dean Chemerinsky and Judge Luttig in the Los Angeles Times. 

Dean Chemerinsky assumed his current post at Berkeley Law in 2017. He has written 19 books and more than 200 law review articles and contributes regularly to the Sacramento Bee, ABA Journal, and Daily Journal. His most recent books are Worse than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism (2022) and Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights (2021).

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from one of America’s most esteemed legal scholars.

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