2018 Tien Award Recipient: Jerry Kang

Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UCLA, Jerry Kang, was selected for the 2018 Chang-Lin Tien Leadership in Education Award. In addition to this honor, the Asian Pacific Fund is providing funds for a Chang-Lin Tien Scholarship for UCLA students.

Jerry Kang is Professor of Law, Professor of Asian American Studies, and the inaugural Korea Times – Hankook Ilbo Endowed Chair in Korean American Studies and Law. He has also served as the University’s inaugural Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion since July 2015.

Vice Chancellor Kang’s teaching and research interests include civil procedure, race, and communications. On race, he has focused on the nexus between implicit bias and the law, with the goal of advancing a “behavioral realism” in legal analysis. He regularly collaborates with leading experimental social psychologists on wide-ranging scholarly, educational, and advocacy projects. His scholarship has been influential, and in 2017, Google Scholar identified one of his works as in the “Top 10 most cited Social Sciences / Law articles” of the past decade. He also lectures broadly to lawyers, judges, government agencies, and corporations about the challenges of implicit bias.

Vice Chancellor Kang is also an expert on Asian American communities, and has written about hate crimes, affirmative action, the Japanese American internment, and its lessons for the “War on Terror.” He is a co-author of Race, Rights, and Reparation: The Law and the Japanese American Internment (2d ed. Wolters Kluwer 2013).

On communications, he has published on the topics of privacy, net neutrality, pervasive computing, mass media policy, and cyber-race (the construction of race in cyberspace). He is also the author of Communications Law & Policy: Cases and Materials (5th edition 2016), a leading casebook in the field.

After graduating magna cum laude in both physics (BA, Harvard College) and law (JD, Harvard Law School), he joined UCLA School of Law as faculty in Fall 1995. He’s been recognized repeatedly for his teaching by being elected Professor of the Year in 1998; receiving the law school’s Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2007; and being chosen for the highest university-wide distinction, the University Distinguished Teaching Award (The Eby Award for the Art of Teaching) in 2010.  At UCLA, he was founding co-Director of the Concentration for Critical Race Studies as well as PULSE: Program on Understanding Law, Science, and Evidence.  Vice Chancellor Kang has taught at Harvard and Georgetown law schools, and was the David M. Friedman Fellow at NYU’s Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice.

Vice Chancellor Kang is a member of the American Law Institute and the Council of Korean Americans. He’s chaired the American Association of Law School’s Section on Defamation and Privacy, has served on the Board of Directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and has received numerous awards including Vice President Al Gore’s “Hammer Award” for Reinventing Government.