Christopher Edley Jr. joined the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law as dean and professor of law in 2004, after twenty-three years as a professor at Harvard Law School. Edley’s academic work is primarily in the areas of civil rights and administrative law. He has also taught federalism, budget policy, defense department procurement law, national security law, and environmental law. Edley was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, a renowned multidisciplinary research and policy think tank focused on issues of racial justice. His publications include Not All Black and White: Affirmative Action, Race, and American Values and Administrative Law: Rethinking Judicial Control of Bureaucracy.

Edley worked as assistant director of the White House domestic policy staff during the Carter administration, where his responsibilities included welfare reform, food stamps, child welfare, disability issues, and social security. He also served as the national issues director for the 1987–88 Dukakis presidential campaign, and then as a senior advisor on economic policy for President Bill Clinton’s transition team in 1992. In the Clinton administration, he worked as associate director for economics and government at the White House Office of Management and Budget from 1993 to 1995. There, he oversaw a staff of seventy civil servants responsible for White House oversight of budget, legislative, and management issues in five cabinet departments (Justice, Treasury, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Commerce) and a diverse group of over forty autonomous agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Federal Communications Commission, and the General Services Administration. In 1995 he was also special counsel to the president, directing the White House review of affirmative action, and in 1997 he was a consultant to the president’s advisory board on the race initiative.

From 1999 to 2005, Edley served as a Congressional appointee on the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In 2001, he was a member of the Carter-Ford National Commission on Federal Election Reform. Currently, he is a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation and of The Century Foundation, and is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Law Institute. He also serves on the executive committee of the advisory board for the Division on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the National Research Council, which is the research arm of the National Academies of Sciences. At the University of California, Berkeley, he is founder and faculty co-director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity, a multidisciplinary think tank.

In March 2006, Edley was named to a national nonpartisan commission created to conduct an independent review of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The twelve-member Commission on No Child Left Behind, co-chaired by former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson and former Georgia Governor Roy E. Barnes, issued recommendations in February 2007 for reforming and improving the legislation as Congress considers reauthorizing federal education laws.

Edley earned his bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College, and his law and master of public policy degrees from Harvard University, where he served as an editor and officer of the Harvard Law Review.