2024 SCOTUS Preview: Erwin Chemerinsky and Kimberly Atkins Stohr

Kimberly Atkins Stohr is a senior opinion writer and columnist with more than 20 years of experience covering politics, policy and law. She is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, a frequent panelist on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and co-host of the popular Politicon legal news podcast #SistersInLaw.

Based in Washington, Kimberly focuses primarily on national political and legal analysis. But she has also written deep-dive series on other pressing topics for Globe Opinion, including the award-winning project on the racial wealth gap in collaboration with the Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research antiracism publication The Emancipator. She also authored a five-part Globe Opinion series on the climate and social justice impacts of the fashion industry. She has won numerous awards, and in 2023 was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Previously, Kimberly was the first Washington, DC-based news correspondent for WBUR. She has also served as the Boston Herald’s Washington bureau chief, guest host of C-SPAN’s morning call-in show Washington Journal, and a Supreme Court reporter for Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly and its sister publications.She has appeared as a political and legal commentator on a host of national and international television and radio networks, including CNN, Fox News, NBC News, PBS, NPR, Sky News (UK), and CBC News (Canada).

Before launching her journalism career, she was a civil trial and appellate litigation attorney in Boston, where she argued in a number of courts, including the Massachusetts Appeals Court and the federal 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals. Kimberly hails from Detroit, and is a graduate of Wayne State University, Boston University School of Law and Boston University College of Communication, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky became the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law on July 1, 2017, when he joined the faculty as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law.

Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law. Before that he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2008, and from 1983-2004 was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, including as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. From 1980-1983, he was an assistant professor at DePaul College of Law.

He is the author of nineteen books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. His most recent major 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).

He also is the author of more than 200 law review articles. He is a contributing writer for the Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times, and writes regular columns for the Sacramento Bee, the ABA Journal and the Daily Journal, and frequent op-eds in newspapers across the country. He frequently argues appellate cases, including in the United States Supreme Court.  

In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2024, National Jurist magazine again named Dean Chemerinsky as the most influential person in legal education in the United States. In 2022, he was the President of the Association of American Law Schools. He received his B.S. at Northwestern University and his J.D. at Harvard Law School.