2018 – Professor Jerry Kang

Jerry Kang is a Distinguished Professor of Law and Distinguished Professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA. He is also the inaugural Korea Times – Hankook Ilbo Endowed Chair in Korean American Studies and Law. At the time of the award, he served as Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at UCLA which he founded in 2015.

Professor 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. He also lectures broadly to lawyers, judges, government agencies, and corporations about implicit bias and how to counter them.

As an expert on Asian American communities, he 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, Professor Kang 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 has been recognized 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 School of Law, he was founding co-Director of the Concentration for Critical Race Studies as well as PULSE: Program on Understanding Law, Science, and Evidence. Professor 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.

Professor Kang is a member of the American Law Institute and the Council of Korean Americans. He has 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.