Taking on Orthodoxy in Race and the Law

Newly tenured Professor R. Richard Banks examines policing, adoption, and marriage.

Photo: Steve Gladfelter

Professor R. Richard Banks (BA/MA '87) is up to his elbows in past lives. Digging his way through stacks of books and papers in his Stanford Law School office, he reaches for an accordion folder and flips through the partitions in search of old newspaper clippings—the remnants of a former life as a freelance journalist in the late 1980s. "Here's one I wrote for the Chicago Tribune on the drug wars," he said, pulling yellowed op-eds out of hiding, "and here's a piece I did as a columnist for the old Peninsula Times Tribune," a newspaper, he jokes, that went out of business a year after he began writing his weekly column.

As an opinion writer whose work has appeared in dozens of newspapers Banks tackled a wide range of subjects—from affirmative action to college athletics. His incisive and often unconventional take on issues of race, equality, and cultural values still informs his work today as a professor at Stanford Law School, where he teaches classes on property, family law, and race and the law.

The 39-year-old Banks joined the law school faculty in 1998. He was recently granted tenure and named Professor of Law and Justin M. Roach, Jr. Faculty Scholar. His path to academia was far from direct. After receiving his bachelor's and master's degrees from Stanford in 1987, Banks ran Stanford's Upward Bound program, which prepares disadvantaged teens for college, and bought and sold real estate.

He developed his drive and ambition from watching his father, a Cleveland barber who always worked a second job, and from his three older sisters. (Banks's mother died when he was nine.) His father desperately wanted him to attend Harvard University for college, but Banks refused to apply. He had his sights set on Stanford. Said Banks, "It was one of only two really big arguments we ever had."

It wasn't until his father passed away in 1989 that Banks decided to give Harvard a try, this time for law school. Banks was attracted to law because, he said, it "is one of the few disciplines that is intellectually stimulating, abstract, and theoretical, yet also concerned with public policy and actual controversies."

Banks's experience as an investor piqued his interest in real estate law, and after receiving his JD in 1994, he joined O'Melveny & Myers LLP in San Francisco, until his then girlfriend and now wife accepted a teaching post at Yale University. After moving to New Haven, Connecticut, Banks spent a year as the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School, then clerked for Judge Barrington D. Parker, Jr., U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, before returning to Stanford.

Banks has recently started work on a book that revisits the concern with family formation and racial equality that marked his first scholarly article. "Compared with other groups, African-Americans are much less likely to marry and much more likely to divorce," he said. While most scholars have explained the lack of marriage among blacks in terms of the lack of marriageable black men, Banks has another influence in mind: the commitment of black women, far beyond that of any other group, to marry within their race. Banks plans to show that such racial solidarity may, ironically, undermine the formation and stability of African-American families and, by extension, hinder racial progress.

"The black community would be well served if more black women considered marrying non-black men," he said. "People have all sorts of queasy feelings about interracial relationships. I want to reorient that debate."

Banks's ideas are sure to provoke spirited reactions. Yet he never tires of grappling with difficult issues. Now a father of three young boys, Banks draws inspiration from his oldest son in particular. He incessantly questions conventional wisdom, he said of his 6-year-old son, Ebbie. "He asks good questions," said Banks. "And that's the beginning of good scholarship." — Nina Nowak