David Benjamin Oppenheimer

David B. Oppenheimer (born 18 March 1950) is a clinical professor of law at Berkeley Law. He is the director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law and the faculty co-director of the pro bono program. He is the author of ten books on civil rights and discrimination law, including the first law school casebook in comparative equality law.

Personal life Oppenheimer attended the New Lincoln School in New York City. He attended a number of universities and graduated from the University Without Walls in 1972 with a degree in political science, and from Harvard Law School in 1978. His sister Amy J. Oppenheimer is the senior partner of a law firm in Berkeley California (Oppenheimer Investigations Group) and a playwright/actress; he also has a brother.

Oppenheimer believes “the cause of racial justice is responsible for his existence.” His grandparents Harry Centennial Oppenheimer and Amy Vorhaus Oppenheimer were troubled by the 1915 release of "The Birth of a Nation" so they independently reached out to Booker T. Washington, who then introduced them to each other. Following graduation in 1978, Oppenheimer clerked for the Chief Justice of California, Rose Elizabeth Bird. He has served as a visiting professor at Sciences Po Paris, University of Paris I, University of Paris X, Queen Mary University of London, University College London, University of Bologna, and LUMSA Rome.

Oppenheimer is a member of the American Law Institute and the advisory committee of the European Union Rewiring project on gender equality.

Expertise Oppenheimer is best known for his expertise and publications on comparative discrimination law and U.S. civil rights history, including the origins of diversity policies. In The New Yorker magazine, he was described as the “diversity detective” for his historical accounts of the origins of the diversity justification for affirmative action.

Oppenheimer has litigated sexual harassment, pay equity and other forms of sex discrimination cases, as well as race, ethnicity, disability, religious, and age discrimination. He has filed amicus curiae briefs in the California, United States and Japanese Supreme Courts and in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (regarding the fatal beating of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas by U.S. border agents). In the U.S. Supreme Court he served as counsel for amicus curiae National Employment Lawyers Association in Burlington Industries v. Ellerth and for a group of U.S. law school deans in support of the Students for Fair Admissions case v Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. The Center works on a variety of issues including climate equality, digital equality, disability rights, global systemic racism, gender-based harassment and violence, equity and criminal justice, LGBTQI rights, intersectional class discrimination, and pay equity. With the Center, Oppenheimer has organized conferences with legal experts on gender discrimination, harassment, and violence. Oppenheimer also mentors young scholars and students at Berkeley and around the globe. His co-authored book Comparative Equality & Anti-Discrimination Law: Cases, Codes, Constitutions & Commentary is the first U.S. textbook on comparative anti-discrimination law. His co-authored Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society, won the 2004 Benjamin L. Hooks outstanding book award. His book The Diversity Principle was published by Yale University Press in 2026.