Kimberly Richman received her B.A. at Pitzer College in
Claremont, California, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in the Department of
Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California,
Irvine, where she also completed a Graduate Emphasis in
Women's Studies. She currently teaches Criminology;
Sociology of Law; and Deviance and Social Control; and will teach
U.S. Inequalities and Social Justice and Gender, Sexuality, and Law
in the future.
Her research interests include gender, sexuality, and law;
crime, law, and the social construction of "deviance"; family law;
legal consciousness; court processes; and reintegrative programming
for prison inmates. She is the author of the award winning book
Courting Change (NYU Press) and multiple articles
and book chapters on the topic of child custody and adoption for
gay and lesbian parents, in which she investigates the negotiation
of sexual and parental identity in family court, the problematic
deployment of rights discourses in the LGBT family law context, and
the development of expanded legal definitions of family over time.
These articles appear in Law & Society Review, Law
& Social Inquiry, Studies in Law, Politics, and
Society, Law & Sexuality, and in the edited
volume, The New Civil Rights Research. She is also the
author of two articles on domestic violence, appearing in
Sociological Inquiry and Studies in Law, Politics, and
Society, and co-author of a book chapter on anti-gay violence
(with Valerie Jenness) in the Handbook of Lesbian and Gay
Studies. Her current research analyzes variation in legal
consciousness regarding same sex marriage through interviews with
gay and lesbian couples in San Francisco and Massachusetts,
appearing in the USF Law Review. In addition, she is a sponsor and
President of the Board of Directors for the San Quentin Alliance
for C.H.A.N.G.E., a non-profit and inmate-led rehabilitative and
community service program at San Quentin State Prison.
