David Carrillo
USC Gould School of Law

David A. Carrillo joined the Berkeley Law faculty as the founding Executive Director of the California Constitution Center in 2012. The center is devoted to developing scholarship concerning the California Constitution and the California Supreme Court.

In October 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Carrillo to a four-year term on the California Law Revision Commission.

Carrillo received his doctorate from Berkeley Law, with a dissertation focused on several areas of California constitutional law. He teaches courses on the California Constitution and the California Supreme Court, publishes articles on those subjects in law journals and other scholarly publications, and edits a blog about the state high court (SCOCAblog.com).

Carrillo was in active practice for 16 years, as a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice, as a deputy city attorney in San Francisco, as a deputy district attorney in Contra Costa County, and as a commercial litigation associate in private practice.

Currently Carrillo serves on the board of the Constitutional Rights Foundation. He has served on many other charitable and professional boards, including: the Bar Association of San Francisco; the California Bar Foundation; the National Advisory Council of the Institute of Governmental Studies; the Foundation for Democracy and Justice; the State Bar Committee on Appellate Courts; the Justice and Diversity Center of the Bar Association of San Francisco; the Volunteer Legal Services Corporation in Alameda County; and the Berkeley Law Alumni Association. Carrillo chaired the judicial appointments committee of the Alameda County Bar Association, and served on the State Bar Commission on Judicial Nominees Evaluation and the Committee of Bar Examiners, as well as San Francisco and Alameda bar association committees on judicial appointments. He is a life member of the La Raza Lawyers Association (San Francisco and East Bay) and the Hispanic National Bar Association.

A member of the California bar since 1995, Carrillo is admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Northern, Southern, Central and Eastern district courts of California.

Carrillo received his BA from UC Berkeley in 1991 and his JD, LLM and JSD at UC Berkeley Law in 1995, 2007 and 20011 respectively. 

FACULTY IN THE NEWS

Los Angeles Times
May 11, 2022
Re: Emily Ryo

Emily Ryo was interviewed about how immigration shortfalls, like soaring housing prices, are fueling California’s population drop. “A whole assortment of the service sector area has been tremendously affected by a lack of immigrant labor that we haven’t really seen and is just really unprecedented,” she said. “Immigrant labor has been a huge part of the long-term home care sector, and a decline in the population in California has had a significant effect.”

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP

Ariela Gross
March, 2022

“Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana,” Centre International de Recherches sur les Esclavages at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France.

Camille Gear Rich
March, 2022

“No More Boxes to Check: Imagining The Anti-Racist Law Firm,” NALP Annual Education Conference, New Orleans, LA.

Thomas D. Lyon
March, 2022

“Disclosure Among Child Abuse Victims” (with K. London and M. Eisen), Fourth Zoom Psychology and Law Symposium: Children in Legal Settings, Maastrict University, Maastricht, Netherlands.