Research Expertise and Interest

education law, social justice, racial justice

Research Description

Jonathan D. Glater joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2021.  His research has focused on the ways that law promotes and limits access to education, especially higher education, and the impact that education debt has on educational opportunities.  Recent publications include Qualified Sovereignty (with Kate Sablosky Elengold) (Wash. L. Rev. 2022); Pandemic Possibilities: Rethinking Measures of Merit (UCLA L. Rev. 2021), and The Civil Rights Case for Student Debt Reform (with Dalié Jiménez) (Harv. Civil Rights-Civil Liberties L. Rev. 2020).  He is also coauthor with Amy Gajda on a casebook, The Law and Higher Education: Cases and Materials on Colleges in Court (5th ed.).  Courses taught include Education Law & Policy, Criminal Law, Disability Law, and in fall 2023, Law in Media.

Glater is a faculty director of the Center on Consumer Law and Economic Justice at Berkeley Law.  With Dalié Jiménez, he is also co-founder and co-director of the Student Loan Law Initiative, an interdisciplinary partnership with the Student Borrower Protection Center devoted to the study of the effects of student debt.  In 2023 he was named a member of the California Civil Rights Council, a volunteer body tasked with developing regulations that implement California’s civil rights laws.  He also serves as co-chair of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on Education and the Law.

Before entering the legal academy, Glater spent nearly a decade as a reporter at The New York Times, where he wrote on the legal profession, legal education, criminal and civil cases in the news, as well as on higher education finance.  Prior to joining the Times, he worked as an associate at the New York law firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, and at the Buenos Aires, Argentina, firm of Marval, O’Farrell, & Mairal.  He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.A. in international relations from Yale University, and a B.A. in economics from Swarthmore College.