UCLA professor receives nomination to serve on National Council on the Humanities
Law professor Jerry Kang became a nominee to join the National Council on the Humanities on Friday. Kang stepped down as vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion in 2020 after five years in the position and has worked on research concerning implicit bias and behavioral realism in legal analysis. (Daily Bruin file photo)
By Constanza Montemayor
Nov. 2, 2021 3:10 p.m.
President Joe Biden nominated distinguished law professor Jerry Kang to be a member of the National Council on the Humanities on Friday.
The National Council on the Humanities is made up of 26 citizens appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Council members serve six-year terms or until their replacement has been sworn in. The council advises the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities on policies and procedures for carrying out duties and awarding grants.
According to the White House announcement, Kang was selected for his expertise in implicit bias and experiences as a professor of law and Asian American studies and UCLA’s founding vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion. He stepped down as vice chancellor in 2020 after serving in the position for five years with the goal to “build equity for all.”
His research focuses on the interaction of implicit bias and law to implement behavioral realism – the use of implicit social cognition, a method to measure people’s subconscious biases, to understand how such biases affect their behavior in certain situations – in legal analysis. He also lectures to government agencies, corporations and others about how to counter implicit bias.
Kang joined the UCLA faculty in 1995 and was elected Professor of the Year in 1998. In 2007, he received the School of Law’s Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching and was awarded the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2010. At the School of Law, he helped found and served as co-director for both the critical race studies concentration and Program on Understanding Law, Science & Evidence.
As a professor of Asian American studies, Kang has also published work on topics such as affirmative action and Japanese American internment, including the book “Race, Rights, and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment,” of which he is a co-author. He is also the author of “Communications Law and Policy: Cases and Materials,” a leading casebook in the field of communications law.
In addition, Kang is a member of the American Law Institute and was previously the recipient of former Vice President Al Gore’s Hammer Award for Reinventing Government, which recognizes federal employees who work to improve government and lessen its costs.
Kang attended Harvard University, earning a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1990 and a doctorate in law in 1993. He previously worked as a clerk for Judge William A. Norris of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and on internet policy at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Kang has also taught at the law schools at Harvard University and Georgetown University.
