Kimani Paul-Emile

Kimani Paul-Emile is a Professor of Law and the Robert L. Levine Distinguished Research Scholar.  She is also Associate Director of Fordham Law School’s Center on Race, Law & Justice, and faculty co-director of the Fordham Law School Stein Center for Law & Ethics.  Dr. Paul-Emile specializes in the areas of law & biomedical ethics, health law, anti-discrimination law, race and the law, civil rights law, drug regulation, and law and society.

Dr. Paul-Emile’s award-winning scholarship has been published widely in such journals as the Virginia Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, George Washington Law Review, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, and Annals of Internal Medicine, among others.  Her co-authored article, “Patient and Trainee Experiences with Patient Bias,” won the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s 2019 John Benson Professionalism Article Prize.  For her article, “Blackness as Disability?,” Dr. Paul-Emile received the Law and Society Association’s 2019 John Hope Franklin Prize, awarded for “exceptional scholarship in the field of race, racism and the law.” 

Her co-authored article, “Dealing with Racist Patients,” has been viewed over 158,000 times, placing it in the 97th percentile of articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and 99th percentile of other medical journals.  Dr. Paul-Emile’s scholarship has appeared in or been covered by national and international news organizations and other outlets, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, National Public Radio, CBS News, MSNBC, CNN, Newsweek, and The Guardian. 

In 2022, Dr. Paul-Emile was awarded an honorary doctorate from Drew University.  In 2020, she was selected to serve as a Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) Fellow at Princeton University for the 2020-2021 academic year.  Dr. Paul-Emile is also currently a member of the Committee on Science, Technology and Law of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. 

In 2017, Dr. Paul-Emile was awarded a Making a Difference in Real World Bioethics Dilemmas Grant by the Greenwall Foundation for 2017-2019; and in 2013, the foundation chose her to receive a Faculty Scholars Award in Bioethics: an award intended to enable outstanding junior faculty members to conduct original research to help resolve important policy and clinical dilemmas at the intersection of ethics and the life sciences.  In 2012, she was awarded a Public Health Law Research Grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s leading philanthropy on health and health care.

Prior to pursuing her doctoral degree, Dr. Paul-Emile served as associate counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, and practiced civil rights law at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she was a National Association for Public Interest Law (now Equal Justice Works) Fellow and later the William Moses Kunstler Fellow for Racial Justice. She also served as senior faculty development consultant at the New York University Center for Teaching Excellence. 

Education

• New York University, PhD
• Georgetown University Law Center, JD
• Brown University, BA, with Honors

Selected Publications

• The Real War on Drugs: Battles Over Drug Regulation and How They Changed America (manuscript in progress)
  
  
• No Strings Attached: How Catholic Institutions Prospered at the Expense of the Administrative State and Patient Autonomy __ J. L. Med & Ethics __ (2024) (with Lori Freeman)
  
  
• Looking Inside and Outside the Law to Understand the Successes and Failures of Drug Reform, Balkinization Symposium on David Pozen’s The Constitution of the War on Drugs (2024)
  
  
• Governing Race Through the Regulation of Drugs, in The Handbook on Race, Racism, and the Law, Aziza Ahmed & Guy-Uriel Charles, eds. (Edward Elgar Publishing, forthcoming 2024)
  
  
• U.S. Law and Discrimination in Health Care, 388 N. Engl. J. Med. 1921-2924 (2023)
  • Accompanying New England Journal of Medicine Podcast
    
    
• Race and Health Law, in The Oxford Handbook of Race and Law in the United States, Khiara M. Bridges, Devon W. Carbado, Emily M.S. Houh, eds., (Oxford University Press, 2022)
  
  
• Addressing Patient Bias Toward Healthcare Workers: Recommendations for Medical Centers, (co-authored) Annals of Internal Medicine (2020)

• Physician and Trainee Experiences with Patient Bias (co-authored) JAMA Intern. Med. 2019; 179(12):1678-1685
  
  • Winner of the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s 2019 John Benson Professionalism Article Prize
    
    
• How Should Organizations Support Trainees in the Face of Patient Bias?, AMA Journal of Ethics, 2019; 21(6): 513-520
  
  
• "All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But some of Us Are Brave" (with Robin Lenhardt) 87 Fordham L. Rev. Online (2019)
  
  
• Blackness as Disability?, 106 GEO. L.J. 293 (2018)

• • Winner of the Law & Society Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize
    
    
• When a Wrongful Birth Claim May Not be Wrong: Race, Inequality, and the Cost of Blackness, 86 Fordham L. Rev. 2811 (2018)
  • Reprinted in Dolgin, Shepherd & Hurst eds., Bioethics and the Law (Aspen Pub., 5th ed. 2024)
    
    
• Dealing with Racist Patients, 374 N. Engl. J. Med. 708 (2016) [co-authored]
  
  
• Foreword: Critical Race Theory and Empirical Methods, 83 Fordham L. Rev. 101 (2015)
  
  
• Beyond Title VII: Rethinking Race, Ex-Offender Status, and Employment Discrimination in the Information Age, 100 Va. L. Rev. 893 (2014)
  
  
• Patients' Racial Preferences and the Medical Culture of Accommodation, 60 UCLA L. Rev. 462 (2012)
  
  
• The Regulation of Race in Science, 80 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1115 (2012)
  
  
• Making Sense of Drug Regulation, 19 Cornell J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 691 (2010)
  • Excerpted in Alex Kreit, Controlled Substances: Crime, Regulation, and Policy (2012)

Selected Awards/Honors/Fellowships

• Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary doctorate), Drew University (2022)
  
  
• Program in Law and Public Affairs Fellowship, Princeton University (2020-2021)
  
  
• John Benson Professionalism Article Prize, American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation (2019) (for Physician and Trainee Experiences with Patient Bias (co-authored) JAMA INTERN. MED. 2019; 179(12):1678-1685). In recognition of “outstanding contributions to the growing body of peer-reviewed journal articles that document the impact of medical professionalism on improving health care.”
  
  
• John Hope Franklin Prize, Law & Society Association (2019) (for Blackness as Disability? 106 GEO. L.J. 293 (2018).  In recognition of “exceptional scholarship in the field of Race, Racism and the Law.”
  
  
• Deans’ Distinguished Research Award, Fordham University School of Law (2018)
  
  
• Making a Difference in Real-World Bioethics Dilemmas Award, Greenwall Foundation (2018-2019)
  
  
• Faculty Scholars Award in Bioethics, Greenwall Foundation (2013-2016)
• Lawyers of Color’s “50 Under 50 List” (2014)
  
  
• Public Health Law Research Grant, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (2011-2013)
  
  
• Health Law Scholar, American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics and the St. Louis University Law School Center for Health Law Studies (2010)