Jerry Kang is Distinguished Professor of Law, Distinguished Professor of Asian American Studies, and was the inaugural Korea Times – Hankook Ilbo Endowed Chair in Korean American Studies and Law (2010-20). He recently stepped down as UCLA’s Founding Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (2015-20)  after completing a five year mission to “build equity for all.”

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.

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 (7th edition 2020), a leading casebook in the field.

During law school, Professor Kang was a Supervising Editor of the Harvard Law Review and Special Assistant to Harvard University’s Advisory Committee on Free Speech. After graduation, he clerked for Judge William A. Norris of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, then worked at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration on cyberspace policy.

He joined UCLA in Fall 1995 and 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.  Prof. 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.

Prof. Kang is a member of the American Law Institute, 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. He has received numerous awards, including Vice President Al Gore’s “Hammer Award” for Reinventing Government and the American Association of Law School’s Clyde Ferguson Award. 

He is on sabbatical for the academic year 2020-21.