Junior / Assistant Specialist - Regulatory Statute Coding - School of Law

Position overview

Position title: Assistant Specialist

Salary range: The UC academic salary scales set the minimum pay determined by rank and step at appointment. See the following table(s) for the current salary scale(s) for this position: Salary Scale. The current base hourly rate for this position is $26.35/hour - $33.87/hour.

Percent time: 40%

Anticipated start: Summer 2026

Position duration: One-year term position, with the possibility of renewal.

Application Window

Open date: May 7, 2026

Next review date: Thursday, May 21, 2026 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)
Apply by this date to ensure full consideration by the committee.

Final date: Sunday, Jun 7, 2026 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)
Applications will continue to be accepted until this date, but those received after the review date will only be considered if the position has not yet been filled.

Position description

Berkeley Law seeks a Junior/Assistant Specialist to contribute to a research project on collecting data from 1947 to 2002 about the details of how Congress provides for the implementation of regulatory statutes. Our goal is to trace Congress' use of criminalization as an implementation strategy, and compare it to alternative or supplementary strategies of implementation, such as empowering and funding expert bureaucracy as an alternative to criminalization to achieve policy goals. We want to understand what explains the choice of criminalization relative to its alternatives. This project will be led by two of Berkeley Law faculty members Sean Farhang and Andrea Roth.

The job will require the candidate to work on electronic databases (Westlaw and Hein) in order to find specific federal statutes, and to read the federal statutes in order to record information about them. To do this, the successful candidate will follow a detailed coding protocol provided by the project that explains how to identify each item that we are coding for, such as the existence of regulatory commands, criminalization provisions, maximum and minimum sentences, and provisions providing for administrative adjudication, administrative sanctions, rulemaking, and allocation of funds to provide for implementation. After reading the statute, the successful candidate will enter codes into an Excel spread sheet, and will aid in maintaining, cleaning, and cross checking the dataset in Stata. Project leaders will closely supervise the successful candidate.

Duties

• Collect and code data through electronic databases (typically in Excel)
• Conduct statistical analyses of data using (Westlaw and Hein)
• Clean and manage large datasets
• Draft project reports, research protocols, and other project documents

Qualifications

Basic qualifications (required at time of application)

• Bachelor's degree (or equivalent international degree)

Preferred qualifications

• A Bachelor's in political science or economics field requiring substantial quantitative coursework.
• Proficiency programming in Westlaw and Hein
• Experience coding complex, detailed documents.
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office (Excel)
• Prior experience as a research assistant/fellow on a political/social science or economics data coding projects

Application Requirements

Document requirements

• Curriculum Vitae - Your most recently updated C.V.
• Cover Letter - Please describe your interests and relevant experience (including prior work on a social science coding project.

Reference requirements

• 3 required (contact information only)

Apply link: https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05323

Help contact: academicpositions@law.berkeley.edu

Job location

Berkeley, CA