Khiara M. Bridges is a professor of law at University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and an anthropologist specializing in the intersectionality of race, class, reproductive justice and law. She studies how reproductive rights law and biomedical ethics reinforce racial inequalities in the U.S. Bridges teaches courses in criminal law, reproductive rights and justice, environmental justice and family law.  

Bridges’ research has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review and Columbia Law Review. She is the author of the 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). She is a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Race and Law in the United States, set to be published in 2021.  

Previously, Bridges was a professor of law at Boston University, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School and Yale Law School. She is a board member of National Advocates for Pregnant Women and former advisory board member for the National Science Foundation: Law and Social Sciences Program; If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice; and Amnesty International’s Pregnancy Task Force. She’s a reviewer for the University of Kansas Press, Duke University Press and Cambridge University Press. 

Bridges received a B.A. in sociology from Spelman College and a Ph.D. in anthropology and a J.D. from Columbia University.

Courtesy of Khiara Bridges, Photo by Dan Watkins

Pronouns: She/her

Expertise: Reproductive law, racial disparities in health, reproductive justice, biomedical ethics, family law, environmental law

Location: Berkeley, Calif. 

Email: khiara.m.bridges@berkeley.edu 

Heard on NPR’s Code Switch: “The Folk Devil Made Me Do It”