Christopher Edley Jr.
Christopher Edley Jr. served as dean of Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) from 2004 to 2013, after twenty-three years as a Harvard Law professor. His academic work is primarily in the areas of administrative law, civil rights, education policy, and domestic public policy. Mr. Edley has moved between academia and public service, each enriching the other and together giving him broad familiarity with many areas of public policy.
Mr. Edley served in White House policy and budget positions in the late 1970s under President Jimmy Carter and in the 1990s under President Bill Clinton. His Clinton service included time at the Office of Management and Budget, where he oversaw the budgets and legislative policy initiatives for five cabinet departments and more than forty independent agencies, with budget authority totaling in the hundreds of billions of dollars. He has held senior positions in five presidential campaigns, including his part -time service during 2007–08 as a senior policy adviser for candidate Barack Obama, whom he taught at Harvard Law.
Mr. Edley’s past civic activities include six years on the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; board vice chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation; the Carter-Ford National Commission on Federal Election Reform following the Florida debacle in 2000; the Aspen Institute Blue Ribbon Commission on Reform of the No Child Left Behind Act; California’s Commission on Tax Reform and the 21st Century Economy; the Commission on the Future of the University of California; and board member for the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition in 2008, with responsibility for education, immigration, and health care reform.
Mr. Edley devotes considerable time to service on committees of the National Research Council (NRC), the operating arm of the National Academies of Science. For seven years he was on the board of the NRC’s Division on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. He is a fellow of the American Law Institute, the National Academy of Public Administration, the Council of Foreign Relations, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Mr. Edley cochaired the congressionally-chartered National Commission on Equity and Excellence in Education, charged broadly with revisiting the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, and recommending future directions for K–12 school reform. In 2015, he and Ann O’Leary cofounded the Opportunity Institute, based in Berkeley and Washington, DC, to do policy research, research-based advocacy, demonstration projects and network building spanning early learning, P–12 reform, post-secondary access and success, school-to-work transitions, the nexus of education and the juvenile and criminal justice systems, and work/family issues.
Mr. Edley holds a BA degree from Swarthmore College, and JD and MPP degrees from Harvard University.