Kimani Paul-Emile is a Ph.D. candidate in the American Studies Program at the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science. Kimani received her B.A. in Political Science and in American Civilization from Brown University. She received her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. Kimani's research interests include issues that occur at the intersection of criminal law, social welfare policy and race. Her current scholarly work focuses on contemporary criminal drug policies and the extensive regulatory regime that has emerged to wage the "war on drugs" in the United States since the early 1980s.
Prior to graduate school, Kimani practiced civil rights law as associate counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, and at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she was a National Association for Public Interest Law Fellow and then the William Moses Kunstler Fellow for Racial Justice.