Erwin Chemerinsky

Chemerinsky also represents a client held at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. He supports affirmative action. In January 2017, Chemerinsky, along with other high-profile lawyers, sued President Donald Trump for refusing to "divest from his businesses".

Chemerinsky has defended freedom of speech from the heckler's veto. Following an incident in which nine members of the (UCI) Muslim Students Union disrupted a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, Chemerinsky asserted that broad freedom exists to invite speakers and hold demonstrations, but that once a speaker has begun an invited lecture, "You have the right – if you disagree with me – to go outside and perform your protest. But you don't get the right to come in when I'm talking and shout me down. Otherwise people can always silence a speaker by heckler's veto, and Babel results."

In March 2011, The National Jurist: The Magazine for Law Students named Chemerinsky one of the "23 Law Profs to Take Before You Die".

A study of legal publications between 2009 and 2013 found Chemerinsky to be the second-most frequently cited American legal scholar, behind Cass Sunstein and ahead of Richard Epstein.

Chemerinsky's hiring as dean of the UCI School of Law was controversial. After signing a contract on September 4, 2007, the hire was rescinded by UCI Chancellor Michael V. Drake, who felt the law professor's commentaries were "polarizing." Drake claimed the decision was his own and not the subject of any outside influence.

On September 17, Chemerinsky issued a joint press release with Drake indicating that Chemerinsky would head the law school. The release stated that the chancellor was "commit[ted] to academic freedom." On September 20, 2007, Chemerinsky's hire was formally approved by the Regents of the University of California.

Chemerinsky taught for over twenty years at the University of Southern California Law School and at DePaul University College of Law before moving to Duke University on July 1, 2004, and then UC Irvine in July 2008. In July 2017, he started a five-year term as dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law.

In 1995, Chemerinsky was a commentator on the O.J. Simpson trial on KCBS-TV, KNX, and CBS News.

Raised in a working-class Jewish family on Chicago's South Side, Chemerinsky attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools for high school. He earned a bachelor's degree in communications from Northwestern University in 1975, where he competed as a debater. He then attended Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. He graduated from Harvard Law with a Juris Doctor cum laude in 1978.

Erwin Chemerinsky (born May 14, 1953) is an American legal scholar known for his studies of United States constitutional law and federal civil procedure. He served as the founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law from 2008 to 2017, and is currently the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.