Linda Hamilton Krieger

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Linda Hamilton Krieger is a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall), where she teaches employment discrimination law, civil rights law and policy, and civil litigation. Her research interests center on the application of social cognition theory to a variety of problems in civil rights law and policy. Her recent work on the social psychology of affirmative action and the “colorblindness” approach to nondiscrimination was cited by the majority in the US Supreme Court’s summer 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger and by the dissenters in its companion case, Gratz v. Bollinger.

At Radcliffe, Krieger will work with two other Radcliffe fellows, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, on a cluster project. The three scholars will explore the implications of recent research on implicit forms of prejudice—a field where new knowledge is accumulating at a rapid rate—for civil rights law and policy in employment, education, criminal justice administration, and health care. In connection with this project, Krieger will develop a normative theory of the use of empirical social science in civil rights jurisprudence, theorizing the troubled relationship between advances in the empirical social sciences and the jurisprudential commitment to doctrinal stability and fealty to precedent.

After earning her AB from Stanford University in 1975 and her JD from New York University School of Law in 1978, Krieger practiced for thirteen years as a civil rights lawyer in San Francisco, California. She taught at the Stanford Law School from 1991 to 1995, received a research fellowship at the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation in 1995, and joined the law faculty at Boalt Hall in 1996.

Making Case for Concept of "Implicit Prejudice" (Harvard Gazette, 12/16/04)