2022 Fall Civil Law Symposium
Panelist Bios

Professor Karen Blum

Suffolk University Law School Professor Emerita Karen Blum has written and taught extensively about civil rights litigation and qualified immunity.  She regularly teaches judges and lawyers around the country about qualified immunity.  She is also a workshop faculty member with the Federal Judicial Center, and teaches Federal Judges and Magistrate Judges about section 1983 jurisprudence.  She is the co-author, along with Michael Avery, David Rudovsky, and Jennifer Laurin, of the treatise Police Misconduct:  Law and Litigation.

Paul Cane

Paul Cane for more than 40 years has represented companies in employment law matters at Paul Hastings LLP, with a special focus on major motions and appeals.  Among other cases, he argued Guz v. Bechtel National, Turner v. Anheuser-Busch, and Baltazar v. Forever 21 in the California Supreme Court; King v. UPS, Dotson v. Amgen, Rhea v. General Atomics, and Veronese v. Lucasfilm in the California Court of Appeal; and Sprint v. Mendelsohn in the U.S. Supreme Court.  He was the editor-in-chief for the ABA’s treatise Employment Discrimination Law.  Mr. Cane graduated from Dartmouth College and Berkeley Law, where he was editor-in-chief of the California Law Review.  Before joining Paul Hastings, he clerked on the D.C. Circuit for Judge Carl McGowan, and on the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

Dean Chemerinsky

Erwin Chemerinsky is Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley School of Law.  Prior to assuming this position, he was the founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law, and a professor at Duke Law School, University of Southern California Law School, and DePaul Law School.  He is the author of 15 books and over 200 law review articles.  He frequently argues appellate cases, including in the United States Supreme Court.  In 2022, he is the President of the Association of American Law Schools.

Gregory Fox

Gregory M. Fox is a founding partner of the San Francisco law firm Bertrand, Fox, Elliot, Osman + Wenzel.  Mr. Fox has been lead trial attorney in more than fifty civil jury cases tried to verdict, and he has been recognized by numerous federal and state civil trial judges for his expertise and oral advocacy.  With more than forty years’ experience trying cases before juries in state and federal courts, his expertise includes constitutional and civil rights issues, as well as public entity torts, contracts, business law, and environmental law.  In 1977, Mr. Fox began his legal career as Senior Energy Advisor in the California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, coordinating California energy policy regarding off- and onshore petroleum development.  From 1980 to 1984, he worked as an antitrust attorney with the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C., where he served as a litigation team leader reviewing mergers and acquisitions in the petroleum industry.  In 1984, he joined the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, where he worked in a special trial team representing the City and County of San Francisco in both federal and state courts.  He resigned his position as deputy city attorney in 1986 to form Bertrand & Fox.

Michael Haddad

Michael J. Haddad is an AV-Preeminent rated attorney and a partner in Haddad & Sherwin LLP, in Oakland, California.  Mr. Haddad served as President (2010-2015) of the National Police Accountability Project (npapjustice.org), a national organization of approximately 600 civil rights attorneys.  The majority of Mr. Haddad’s practice is to represent plaintiffs in police misconduct and other civil rights litigation, including wrongful death, police shootings, excessive force, jail suicide and death, and municipal liability.  The many police and jail misconduct cases he and his firm have tried and settled in federal and state courts include a $3.5 million settlement for the family of a police officer killed by “friendly fire,” a $5.5 million settlement in a notorious video-recorded beating by officers, a $1.1 million verdict for a man attacked by a police dog when he trespassed in a construction site to rescue a cat, and the largest wrongful death settlement as of 2015 in a civil rights case in the State of California, resolving for $8.3 million plus sweeping jail reforms for the death of a jail inmate after one week of trial. Where possible, Mr. Haddad and his firm also obtain voluntary or court-ordered injunctive relief to improve police department and jail policies and procedures.  He has been listed as a “Northern California Super Lawyer” in San Francisco Magazine for from 2004-2019.  He graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in 1991.

Judge William Orrick

Judge William Orrick began his legal career in 1979 as a civil rights and poverty law attorney with Georgia Legal Services Programs in Savannah, Georgia. He moved home to San Francisco in 1984 and had a litigation practice involving primarily complex commercial and employment matters at Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass LLP. In 2009, he became Counselor to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Division in the United States Department of Justice and later the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of Office of Immigration Litigation. President Obama nominated him to become a federal district judge in 2012 and he was confirmed the following year.

Michael Rubin

Michael Rubin is partner at Altshuler Berzon LLP in San Francisco, where he specializes in appellate litigation, class actions, and public policy/impact litigation. Before joining Altshuler Berzon in 1981, he clerked for Judge Charles B. Renfrew of the Northern District of California, Chief Judge James R. Browning Jr. of the Ninth Circuit, and Associate Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. of the Supreme Court. Michael has won seven “California Lawyer of the Year” (CLAY) awards from California Lawyer Magazine/Daily Journal, winning four times in the Employment Law category, once in the Worker Health and Safety category, once for False Claims Act Litigation, and once for Criminal Law. He has also been recognized by the California Daily Journal each year since 2016 as one of the “Top 100 Lawyers in California.” Michael had litigated many PAGA and mandatory arbitration cases in the trial courts and on appeal, and is currently lead appellate counsel for the plaintiffs in Moriana v. Viking River Cruises and in Adolph v. Uber Technologies, Inc.