Pauline Kim is the Daniel Noyes Kirby Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. She earned an A.B. from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges in 1984, a Henry Fellowship at New College, Oxford University from 1984 to 1985, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1988. Following law school, she clerked for the Honorable Cecil F. Poole on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and served as Félix Velarde-Muñoz Fellow and later staff attorney at the Employment Law Center/Legal Aid Society of San Francisco, representing low-income workers. At Washington University School of Law, she was the inaugural John S. Lehmann Research Professor in 2007-2008 and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development from 2008 to 2010. She currently directs the Center for Empirical Research in the Law, holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Sociology, and is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Equity and the Cordell Institute. Kim is a member of the Labor Law Group, served as an adviser to the American Law Institute’s Restatement of Employment Law, and serves on the program committee of the Privacy Law Scholars’ Conference.

A nationally recognized expert in employment law, Pauline Kim has authored dozens of articles and book chapters on workplace governance, including employee privacy, discrimination, job security, and the challenges posed by artificial intelligence and big data. Key publications include the leading textbook Work Law: Cases and Materials (4th ed., 2015, with Marion Crain and Michael Selmi), “Data-Driven Discrimination at Work” (58 William & Mary Law Review 857, 2017), “Race-Aware Algorithms: Fairness, Nondiscrimination and Affirmative Action” (110 California Law Review 1539, 2022), “Less Discriminatory Algorithms” (forthcoming 113 Georgetown Law Journal, 2024, with Emily Black et al.), and “Limitations of the ‘Four-Fifths Rule’ and Statistical Parity Tests for Measuring Fairness” (8 Georgetown Law Technology Review 93, 2024, with Manish Raghavan). Her scholarship has received major honors, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024, the Future of Privacy Forum’s Privacy Papers for Policymakers Award in 2024 for “Less Discriminatory Algorithms,” the International Association of Privacy Professionals Best Paper award in 2016 for “Data-Driven Discrimination at Work,” and Washington University Founders Day Distinguished Faculty Award in 2021. Kim’s empirical research on judicial hierarchies and employment discrimination enforcement has significantly influenced legal academia and policy.

Professional Email: kim@wustl.edu