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Professor Kim Hai Pearson’s current research and writing projects focus on identity and children in international migration streams, including trafficking, adoption, asylum-seeking travel, natural disaster, and economic immigration. In the context of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), a legal framework exists for extending legal protection based on a child’s identity. Combining research on implementing the CRC’s legal principles in alignment with children’s identities may provide significant interventions in cases of violence and oppression of children. Professor Pearson’s expertise includes Contracts, Law & Sexuality, ADR, and Wills & Trusts.

In her earlier work, Professor Pearson’s scholarship focused on the impact of identity classification for domestic family law purposes, including unfair outcomes for racial, religious, and sexual minority families. Her work is informed by her practice in a family law firm, critical literary theory, and non-advocacy research and writing at the Williams Institute. Professor Pearson has delivered a Neil Gotanda Lecture at Berkeley Law and presented nationally and internationally on her scholarship. Her scholarship can be found in the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, the UC Irvine Law Review, the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, the Oxford Handbook on LGBT Divorce and Relationship Dissolution, and the Cambridge University Press’s Feminist Judgments Rewritten Opinions: Reproductive Rights.

Professor Pearson held a Law Teaching Fellowship at the Williams Institute housed at UCLA Law School where she taught Law and Sexuality, Legal Scholarship, and Family Law. She received her J.D. from the J. Reuben Clark School of Law at Brigham Young University, her M.A. in British and American Literature from the University of Utah, and her MSt in International Human Rights Law at Oxford University.