Evolving Doctrine Lecture Series

"Letting Die: Black Maternal and Infant Deaths After Students for Fair Admissions"

Bridges is a nationally-recognized expert on the intersection of race, class, and reproductive rights. Her scholarship has appeared in the most influential law reviews in the country, including the flagship law journals at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, among many others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019, 2026). Her fourth book, Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans, was released in March 2026.

Bridges graduated as valedictorian from Spelman College, receiving her degree in three years. She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School and her Ph.D., with distinction, from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology. She speaks fluent Spanish and basic Arabic, and she is a classically-trained ballet dancer who danced professionally in New York City for twenty years before moving to the Bay Area.

She will discuss that at present, black people die from pregnancy-related causes at more than three times the rate of their white counterparts, and black babies die at twice white babies' rate. This talk examines the legality of race-conscious efforts to diminish these racial disparities in maternal and infant mortality — ultimately concluding that Students for Fair Admissions, which struck down the race-based affirmative action programs at the University of North Carolina and Harvard College, does not foreclose many race-conscious efforts to save black maternal and infant lives.

A productive scholar and an award-winning teacher, Pamela S. Karlan is co-director of the school’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, where students litigate live cases before the Court. One of the nation’s leading experts on voting and the political process, she has served as a commissioner on the California Fair Political Practices Commission, an assistant counsel and cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and (twice) as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (where she received the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service – the department’s highest award for employee performance – as part of the team responsible for implementing the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Windsor). Professor Karlan is the co-author of leading casebooks on constitutional law, constitutional litigation, and the law of democracy, as well as numerous scholarly articles. She is co-reporter on the American Law Institute’s forthcoming Restatement on Constitutional Torts.

Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1998, she was a professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law and served as a law clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Abraham D. Sofaer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Karlan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute.