Ralph Richard Banks

Ralph Richard Banks (BA ’87, MA ’87) is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, the co-founder and Faculty Director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, and Professor, by courtesy, at the School of Education. A native of Cleveland, Ohio and a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School (JD 1994), Banks has been a member of the Stanford faculty since 1998. Prior to joining the law school, he practiced law at O’Melveny & Myers, was the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School and clerked for a federal judge, the Honorable Barrington D. Parker, Jr. (then of the Southern District of New York). Professor Banks teaches and writes about family law, employment discrimination law and race and the law. He is the author of Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone. At Stanford, he is affiliated with the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and the Ethnicity, the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. His writings have appeared in a wide range of popular and scholarly publications, including the Stanford Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He has been interviewed and quoted by numerous print and broadcast media, including ABC News/Nightline, National Public Radio, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, among others.

Education

• BA Stanford University 1987
• MA Stanford University 1987
• JD Harvard Law School 1994

Expertise

• Children & the Law
• Civil Rights
• Constitutional Law
• Distributive Justice
• Equal Protection
• Family Law
• Inequality
• Race & the Criminal Justice System

Courses

• Constitutional Law: The Fourteenth Amendment
• Critical Race Theory
• Directed Research
• Family Law I: Regulating Marriage and other Intimate Relationships
• Family Law II: Parent-Child Relationships
• Policy Practicum: Alabama Innovation
• Policy Practicum: Selective De-Policing: Operationalizing Concrete Reforms
• Policy Practicum: The Youth Justice Lab: Imagining an Anti-Racist Public Education System
• Race, Disadvantage, and Elite Education: The Allocation of Opportunity
• TGR: Dissertation

Affiliations & Honors

• Member, Faculty Advisory Board for the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research
• Faculty Associate, Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity