Kimani Paul-Emile Aims to Inspire Social Justice Activism in Students

By James Devitt

With a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, where she was a 13-time Ivy League Track and Field Champion, and a law degree from Georgetown, Kimani Paul-Emile was confident she had the skills to make a difference.

“Since I was young, I wanted to go into public interest law,” says Paul-Emile, who graduates today from NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Science with a doctorate in American studies. “My goal was to become a civil rights lawyer—a radical civil rights lawyer.”

Paul-Emile followed this path after earning her J.D. from Georgetown, working first as a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she provided legal and organizing assistance to immigrant workers in New York City’s garment industry, and then as associate counsel at NYU School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice.

But after four years as a lawyer, Paul-Emile began to see the limits imposed on her profession.

“I realized that the courts were essentially closed to certain types of critical cases,” she says. “The federal judiciary had become increasingly conservative and the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the law in ways that made it very difficult to bring important claims on behalf of poor and marginalized communities. In my frustration with legal practice, I found myself critiquing the law where it needed to change. Then I realized that if I pursued a Ph.D., I could do this all the time.”

Paul-Emile was hardly a stranger to NYU—her parents, both international students at NYU’s Washington Square College, met on the first floor of Main Building in 1958. Her mother, Barbara, originally from Jamaica, graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor’s (1962) and an M.A. in English (1963). Her father, Serge, is a native of Haiti and earned a bachelor’s in physics in 1962. Both subsequently obtained their doctorates from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

“I decided to go into American studies,” she says. “Its inter-disciplinary approach allowed me to use different methods to address specific questions about legal norms and the complex relationship between law and other areas of social life.”

Her dissertation, “Drug Regulatory Regimes and the Art of Governance,” examines how different drug use and users have been regulated since the 1980s by assessing the regulatory regimes established to govern consumption of tobacco, cocaine, marijuana, steroids, and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in order to explore the operation of social, political, and economic power in contemporary drug regulation.

But while Paul-Emile has spent much of her professional and academic life conducting research, at NYU she fell in love with teaching.

“When I first came to NYU, my real motivation was research,” Paul-Emile says. “I hadn’t thought much about teaching, but found that I love teaching—I loved classroom experience.

“Becoming an academic is not a departure from my commitment to social justice work, which first inspired me to attend law school and practice civil rights law,” she says. “Rather, it is a continuation of that commitment to the extent that education can be a far more formidable tool than law in illuminating and understanding social inequality and in promoting and achieving meaningful and lasting social justice.”