K-Sue Park

Professor of Law

  • B.A. Cornell University, 2002
  • M.Phil. University of Cambridge, 2003
  • J.D. Harvard Law School, 2015
  • Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 2015

K-Sue Park is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. She writes and teaches about property law, race and law, and migration and settlement in American legal history. Specifically, her scholarship examines the development of American property law and the creation of the American real estate market through the histories of colonization and enslavement. Previously, she was a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and the Critical Race Studies Fellow at UCLA School of Law. Recently, she was also an Emerson Collective Fellow and the Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. and Annette L. Nazareth Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ.

Park received her B.A. summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa honors from Cornell University, where she was a College Scholar, and her M.Phil with Distinction in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge. In 2003, she was a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea. She then earned her Ph.D. in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley, where she was a Javits Fellow, and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was a Presidential Scholar. In 2015, her article, “Money, Mortgages, and the Conquest of America” won the American Bar Foundation’s graduate student paper competition and the Association for Law, Culture and the Humanities’ Austin Sarat Award, and was selected for the Law and Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop. Before returning to academia, she was an Equal Justice Works Fellow and staff attorney with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid’s foreclosure defense team in El Paso, TX, where she investigated and litigated against predatory mortgage lending schemes.

Park’s publications have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, The University of Chicago Law Review, The History of the Present, Law & Social Inquiry, and the New York Times, among others.

Bibliography

  • Articles And Chapters
    • Property and Sovereignty in America: A History of Title Registries & Jurisdictional Power, 133 Yale L.J. (forthcoming 2023). Full Text
    • Race and Property Law, in The Oxford Handbook of Race and Law in the United States, (edited by Devon Carbado, Khiara Bridges & Emily Houh, Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
    • The History Wars and Property Law: Conquest and Slavery as Foundational to the Field, 131 Yale L.J. 1062 (2022). Full Text
    • Property, in Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, (edited by The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, New York: New York University Press, 2021). Full Text
    • Race, Innovation, and Financial Growth: The Example of Foreclosure, in Histories of Racial Capitalism , 27 (edited by Destin Jenkins & Justin Leroy, New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).
    • Whose Free Speech?, in Dissent, 42 (Summer 2021). Full Text
    • This Land Is Not Our Land, 87 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1977 (2020). (reviewing Jedediah Purdy, This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth (2019)). Full Text
    • Self-Deportation Nation, 132 Harv. L. Rev. 1878 (2019). Full Text
    • Insuring Conquest: U.S. Expansion and the Indian Depredation Claims System, 1796–1920, 8 Hist. Present 57. Full Text
    • Money, Mortgages, and the Conquest of America, 41 Law & Soc. Inquiry 1006 (2016). Full Text
    • 48 Law & Soc’y Rev. 692-694 (2014)(reviewing N. Bruce Duthu, Shadow Nations: Tribal Sovereignty and the Limits of Legal Pluralism (2013)).
  • News And Commentary
    • The GOP's War on 'Critical Race Theory' is all about Winning Elections. The American Independent, May 28, 2021. Full Text
    • OP-ED: You Should Have the Right to Know your Landlord's Name.  Los Angeles Times, February 24, 2020, (Op-ed)
    • Berkeley Conversations: Critical Race Theory and the 2020 Election. coverage in Berkeley News, November 2, 2020.

Courses Available