Berkeley Law Professor Khiara Bridges to Deliver Commencement Address

UC Berkeley Professor of Law Khiara M. Bridges will be keynote speaker at UC Davis School of Law’s Class of 2024 commencement on Friday, May 10.

Bridges is a nationally recognized expert on race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Columbia Law Review, California Law Review, NYU Law Review, and Virginia Law Review, among others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). Her fourth book, Expecting Inequity: Race, Class, and Reproductive Justice, is under contract with MIT Press. 

She graduated as valedictorian from Spelman College, receiving her degree in three years. She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School and her Ph.D., with distinction, from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology. While in law school, she was a teaching assistant for the former dean, David Leebron (Torts), as well as for the late E. Allan Farnsworth (Contracts). She was a member of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar.

Bridges delivered the Bodenheimer Lecture on Family Law in 2021 as part of the law school’s Racial Justice Speaker Series.

Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Mary Croughan will attend commencement. Professor Elizabeth Joh and graduating students Jake Kim and Michaela Hadjicostandi-Anang also will speak. Professors Irene Joe and Courtney Joslin will serve as faculty marshals.