Linda Hamilton Krieger is a retired Berkeley Law Professor who is returning to Cal from their present appointment as a Professor of Law at the University of Hawai’i to serve as a Visiting Professor at Berkeley Law for the 2021-22 Academic Year.
Between graduating from law school in 1978 and entering law teaching full time in 1992, Professor Krieger practiced as an employment discrimination lawyer in San Francisco, representing plaintiffs in race, sex, national origin, and disability discrimination class actions and individual cases at the trial and appellate levels, drafting state and federal legislation in the areas of civil rights, evidence, and civil procedure, and writing on topics in critical feminist theory. At the Employment Law Center (now known as “Legal Aid at Work”) Professor Krieger represented workers in cases establishing important precedents in the areas of pregnancy discrimination (California Federal Savings and Loan v. Guerra), sexual harassment (Priest v. Rotary), and the rights of workers subject to mass layoffs (Carson v. Atari). Professor Krieger was an early member of the Board of Directors and the Executive Board of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and a founding member of the San Francisco AIDS Legal Referral Panel and the AIDS Interfaith Network in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
Professor Krieger’s legal scholarship explores how insights from the empirical social sciences can be used to inform civil rights law and policy, judicial decision making, and the lawyer-client relationship. Significant publications include Problem Solving, Decision Making & Professional Judgment: A Guide for Lawyers and Policy Makers (with P. Brest, Oxford U. Press); When Organizations Rule: Judicial Deference to Institutionalized Employment Structures (with L. Edelman et. al., Am. J. of Sociology); The Content of Our Categories: A Cognitive Bias Approach to Discrimination and Equal Employment Opportunity (Stanford L. Rev.); Civil Rights Perestroika: Intergroup Relations After Affirmative Action (California L. Rev.), Behavioral Realism in Employment Discrimination Law: Implicit Bias & Disparate Treatment (with Susan Fiske, California L. Rev.), and Backlash Against the Americans with Disabilities Act: Reinterpreting Disability Rights (U. of Mich. Press).
Professor Krieger has served as a Visiting Professor at the Stanford Law School, the Harvard Law School, and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. In 2004-2005, Professor Krieger was a Research Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where they worked with Harvard social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji on bringing insights from empirical social psychological work on implicit bias into U.S. antidiscrimination doctrine.
Professor Krieger’s teaching areas include civil procedure, legislation and statutory interpretation, the legal profession, and civil rights law and policy.
Education
A.B. Stanford University (1975)
J.D. New York University School of Law (1978)