Looking Back (and Ahead!) at the Samuelson Clinic’s 25th Anniversary

Blue-and-white illustration of Berkeley landmarks surrounded by symbols of law and technology, including a robot, gavel, scales, drone, lightbulb, and flying papers.

Later this September, the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley Law will mark its 25th anniversary with a two-day celebration. On September 24 and 25, the Clinic’s community will come together in Berkeley to reflect on its work at the intersection of technology, law, and public policy—and to think about what comes next.

Pam Samuelson, my PhD adviser and the Clinic’s namesake, can count this—and the many other high-tech clinics it helped inspire—among the most important parts of her public-interest legacy. During Pam’s festschrift last year, I was very happy to contribute a piece about what Pam and her work have meant to technologists like me: “Pam and Inspiring Technologists” (PDF).

The full program and registration information are available from Berkeley Law.

I’m pleased to be speaking Thursday on “The Clinic’s Work and Its Impact.” Deirdre Mulligan of the UC Berkeley School of Information—the Clinic’s founding director and OG clinical professor, as well as my NSF grant supervisor during my PhD work—will moderate. I’ll be joined by Lila Bailey of the Internet Archive, Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Jonathan Unikowski of Avec.

Later that afternoon, Cory Doctorow will give the keynote. Like a bunch of us, I first came to know Cory through danah, then as an activist at EFF and a sci-fi author. I highly recommend his recent On The Media interview with the unparalleled Brooke Gladstone, “F@#$ the AI Overlords”, about his new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Cory has a gift for showing how a pile of seemingly unrelated annoyances are often the same fight over who gets to control the technology we use, so I’m very curious to hear where he goes with the keynote.

And this anniversary isn’t just a round number. For 25 years, the Samuelson Clinic has been working on many of the hard questions we still wrestle with today: privacy, free expression, copyright, transparency, innovation, and digital rights. The technologies have changed a lot; the underlying fights, not so much.

Clinics are also a pretty unusual—and cool—part of the ecosystem. They’re part classroom, part law office, part public-interest institution, working on real problems while training the people who will take on the next ones. That kind of work doesn’t always show up in the usual histories of technology policy, but it matters enormously. It has also inspired work like what we do at the Internet Society through our Amicus Program, where we intervene in important cases and controversies around the world, not just in the United States.

So I’m looking forward to both halves of the conversation: what the Clinic’s first 25 years can teach us, and what serious, technically informed public-interest work needs to look like for the next 25.