Board: Board Alumni

Michael J. Faris

Michael Faris is Vice President & Assistant General Counsel -- Litigation at Stericycle, Inc. Previously, Faris was a partner at Latham & Watkins, where he was the local co-chair of the Litigation & Trial Department. He has significant experience in complex litigation matters, with a focus on securities and professional liability litigation. Faris also has expertise in complex commercial litigation in the areas of antitrust, trademark and patent infringement, and insurance litigation. Faris serves on the ACS Board of Advisors and previously served on the ACS Board of Directors.

Faris’ noteworthy client representations include a public company in 11 consolidated class actions, two state court derivative actions, and one federal court derivative action alleging violations of federal securities laws and fiduciary duties. He has represented clients in private securities suits under blue sky statutes, as well as a large venture capital fund in litigation over several contractual and fiduciary duty claims. He made an oral argument on the client's motion for a partial summary judgment. He began his career at Latham & Watkins as an associate.

Faris received his J.D. from the University of Chicago and his A.B. in social studies from Harvard.

Erwin Chemerinsky

Erwin Chemerinsky is Dean and the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at Berkeley Law. Over his academic career, his courses have focused on constitutional law, First Amendment law, federal Courts, criminal procedure and appellate litigation. He also has frequently argued appellate cases, including several in the U. S. Supreme Court. Chemerinsky sits on the ACS Board of Academic Advisors.

Prior to joining Berkeley Law, Chemerinsky was the founding dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at the University of California Irvine School of Law, with a joint appointment in Political Science. Prior to that, he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University. Earlier in his career, he was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, working as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. He has previously taught at the DePaul College of Law and UCLA Law School.

Chemerinsky has authored 10 books, including “The Case Against the Supreme Court,” and “Closing the Courthouse Doors: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable.” He co-authored “Free Speech on Campus.” He has also published more than 200 law review articles. He has a weekly column in the Sacramento Bee, and regular columns in the ABA Journal and the Daily Journal. He frequently authors op-eds in national newspapers.

Chemerinsky was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. The National Jurist magazine named him the most influential person in legal education in the United States in 2017.

Chemerinsky received his J.D. from Harvard cum laude and his B.S. from Northwestern University with highest distinction.

Mark Califano

Mark Califano is a Partner at Dentons. Prior to this, he was Chief Legal Officer and Regional Managing Director of the Americas at Nardello and Company. Previously, he was Senior Vice President and Managing Counsel for Litigation at American Express and managed major litigation, significant investigations and other sensitive matters. In 2014, Califano was appointed to the ACS board of directors.

Prior to joining Amex, Califano was Senior Vice President and head of litigation & legal policy at GE Capital. Previously, he was head of litigation in GE Commercial Finance at GE Capital. He served as Chief Legal Counsel for the Independent Inquiry into the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme at United Nations, and co-authored “Good Intentions Corrupted: The Oil-for-Food Scandal and the Threat to the U.N.” As Chief Legal Counsel, he managed the global investigation and the over 75-person staff, including lawyers, investigators, analysts, and experts.

Califano also served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Connecticut, investigating and prosecuting federal white-collar offenses, including public corruption, corporate and securities fraud, domestic and foreign bribery, terrorism, intellectual property, and Internet offenses. Earlier in his career, he was an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate. Meagher & Flom.

He has also taught programs on litigation and trial practice, Foreign Corrupt Practice, Internet, terrorism, fraud, and money laundering investigations and prosecutions.

Califano received his J.D. from Duke University, and his B.A. in history of philosophy from Princeton. He clerked for the Hon. Stanley Sporkin of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

Timothy W. Burns

Tim Burns is a partner at Burns Bowen Bair LLP.  He combines a deep understanding of insurance law and the insurance industry with a broad understanding of the civil litigation system that allows him to bring creative solutions to high-stakes problems.

Before founding Burns Bowen Bair LLP, Tim was a partner at three of the largest law firms in the country and led the insurance recovery practice groups at two of those law firms.  Tim built from scratch one of the world’s top directors’ and officers’ insurance practices. He has co-authored two books on directors’ and officers’ insurance and lectured and written widely on that topic as well as many other areas of insurance law and public policy.  For years, Tim taught at directors’ colleges put on by some of the foremost law and business schools in the country, including Stanford’s Directors’ College and the University of Chicago, Stanford and Dartmouth Directors’ Consortium.

Since the financial crisis, Tim has led a small group of lawyers who have obtained over $1 billion in settlements and judgments from the insurance industry under many different types of insurance policies, including general liability insurance, directors’ and officers’ insurance, professional liability insurance, fiduciary liability insurance, cyber insurance, property insurance, and crime and fidelity insurance.

Tim represents some of the largest corporations in the country and their boards of directors, and he also regularly partners with plaintiffs’ lawyers in seeking insurance recoveries for major liability claims and in holding the insurance industry accountable for financial fraud and other misdeeds.

Tim served on the board of directors of the American Constitution Society and serves on the board of the Wisconsin Justice Initiative.  In 2019, he was appointed by Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers to serve on the National Commission on Uniform State Laws.  He is a member of the American Law Institute and is the institutional representative for the American Constitution Society at the European Law Institute.  Tim chaired the Insurance Coverage Litigation Committee of the American Bar Association. After law school, Tim served as a law clerk to Judge George G. Fagg on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.  In 2015, Senator Tammy Baldwin forwarded Tim’s name to President Obama as one of her choices to serve on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Elise Boddie

Elise Boddie is a Henry Rutgers University Professor, Professor of Law and Judge Robert L. Carter Scholar at Rutgers University. She teaches courses on constitutional law, civil rights, and state and local government law. She has been published in numerous journals, including the Columbia Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, and the Harvard Law Review Forum.

Previously, Boddie was the Director of Litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF). She oversaw its nationwide litigation program, including its advocacy in major U.S. Supreme Court and federal appellate cases involving voting rights, affirmative action, and fair housing. As Director of Education and an Associate Director of Litigation at LDF, she litigated affirmative action, employment, economic justice, and school desegregation cases in federal district courts and in federal courts of appeals.

Earlier in her career, Boddie litigated at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson as a fellow. She also taught at New York and Fordham Law Schools.

Boddie is the founder and Executive Director of The Inclusion Project at Rutgers, a founding trustee of the New Jersey Coalition for Diverse and Inclusive Schools, and a board member of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. She served on the Rutgers-Newark Chancellor's Commission on Diversity and Transformation and on the steering committee of the National Coalition on School Diversity. She ran the Civil Rights & Racial Justice Policy Working Group in Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. She was elected to The American Law Institute in 2017. She has been a guest on MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, Democracy Now and National Public Radio, among other television and radio programs.

Boddie received her J.D. cum laude and M.P.P. from Harvard and a B.A. in economics and political science cum laude from Yale. She clerked for the Hon. Robert L. Carter in the Southern District of New York.

Nicole G. Berner

Nicole G. Berner is General Counsel to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), where she provides strategic legal advice to the union on a broad range of legal matters, including many of SEIU’s innovative organizing campaigns. She is also a partner at James & Hoffman, P.C. During her more than 20-year legal career, her practice has focused on the intersections of economic justice, racial justice, gender equality, and LGBTQ rights. In 2017, Berner was appointed to the ACS board of directors.

Prior to becoming SEIU’S General Counsel in 2017, Berner spent 11 years as in-house counsel at the union – first as Counsel to the Union’s healthcare division and later as Deputy General Counsel. She has represented SEIU and the Change to Win labor federation in a broad range of cases in state and federal courts, including helping to defend the Affordable Care Act, legal challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act and marriage discrimination, and a successful challenge to Pennsylvania’s onerous voter ID requirement. Prior to her work at SEIU, she served as a staff attorney at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where she litigated reproductive rights cases and represented PPFA in state and federal efforts to protect and expand access to reproductive healthcare. Before that, Berner was a litigation associate at the Washington, D.C., office of Jenner & Block.

Berner also serves on the board of directors of the National Partnership for Women and Families.

Berner graduated Order of the Coif from Boalt Hall (U.C. Berkeley) School of Law, where she concurrently completed a master’s degree in public policy (MPP) from Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. Berner served as a law clerk to the Hon. Betty Binns Fletcher on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the Hon. Thelton E. Henderson on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.  She received her B.A. in Women’s Studies from U.C. Berkeley.