FOREFRONT
Competition with “Academic Networks Beyond National Borders.” Doctoral candidate Johann Koehler addresses the 1978 inception of JSP itself in “The Development and Fracture of a Discipline: Legacies of the School of Criminology at Berkeley.” That effort earned him last year’s Graduate Student Paper Award from the
American Society of Criminology’s Division on Critical Criminology. “JSP faculty is among the most impressive groups of interdisciplinary law scholars in the world,” Morrill says. “That enables the program to attract and produce graduate students who go on to importantly shape the field.” —Wendy Witherspoon
Three Award-Winning Professors Join Faculty Joshua Cohen, Sonia Katyal, and Dylan C. Penningroth bring expertise and exuberance to their new positions
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political theorist, an AfricanAmerican history specialist, and a property law expert will all join the Berkeley Law faculty this summer. As Transcript went to press, three new professors had been hired for the 2015-16 school year: Joshua Cohen, Sonia Katyal, and Dylan C. Penningroth.
“ I try to be available to my students as much as possible. They inspire me to get up every morning ... and it’s an honor to support their work in return.” —Sonia Katyal
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Joshua Cohen — One of the world’s leading
political theorists, Cohen examines issues at the intersection of democratic norms and institutions. He will be a distinguished senior fellow and hold similar positions in the Departments of Philosophy and Political Science. “UC Berkeley is an amazing school and I’m thrilled to join it,” Cohen says. “It’s the greatest public university in the country. I have a lot of personal and professional connections here— most notably my wife, Ellen Eisen, who teaches in the School of Public Health.” Previously, Cohen was a professor at Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At Berkeley, he will lead a weekly course that brings in outside speakers to present works-inprogress in legal, moral, and political philosophy. It will alternate between the law school’s Kadish Center for Morality, Law & Public Affairs and the College of Letters and Science’s Social Sciences Matrix. “The course is built around interesting people who are working on meaningful projects,” says Cohen, who will also serve on dissertation com-
| TRANSCRIPT | SPRING 2015
mittees for Berkeley Law’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) Program. “We’ll convene scholars in law, political science, philosophy, and sometimes other disciplines to expose students to compelling ideas from a wide range of fields.” The author of 10 books, Cohen has written extensively on issues of democratic theory and global justice. Since 1991, he has also served as the editor of Boston Review, a bimonthly magazine of political, cultural, and literary ideas. Cohen is currently on the faculty at Apple University, the technology company’s internal training program for employees. “We get them thinking about topics, concepts, and issues that may have importance in their decision-making and engagement with the rest of the world,” he says. “One of my courses is called ‘The Best Things,’ which came from a remark by Steve Jobs. His premise was that if you want to produce great products, you have to ‘expose yourself to the best things humans have done, and bring those things into what you are doing.’ ”
Sonia Katyal — Katyal’s recruiting visit to
Berkeley Law fueled an already turbo-charged interest in joining the school. “The students are a vibrant, inspiring, brilliant bunch of individuals,” she says. “I’m also very excited about joining a world-class faculty that excels in two areas I care deeply about: intellectual property and gender and sexuality.” Katyal taught for 13 years at Fordham