Nancy S. Kim

Professor of Law and
Visiting Professor,
Rady School of Management,
University of California, San Diego

LL.M. University of California, Los Angeles [public international law]
J.D. University of California, Berkeley
A.B. University of California, Berkeley
[high honors and distinction, Phi Beta Kappa]

Courses Taught: Contracts I & II, Licensing, Sales, Topics in Corporate Governance:  Current Issues in Business Law (at Rady School of Management, UCSD)

Professor Kim joined the faculty in fall 2004.  She has also taught as a visiting faculty member at The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law, Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego and Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. 

Prior to joining the faculty at California Western, Professor Kim was Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs of a multinational software and services company. She has worked in business and legal capacities for several Bay Area technology companies and was an associate in the corporate law departments at Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe in San Francisco and Gunderson, Dettmer in Menlo Park. 

While in law school, Professor Kim was Associate Editor of the California Law Review and Associate Editor of the Berkeley Women’s Law Journal. After graduating from law school, she was a Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center and a Ford Foundation Fellow at UCLA School of Law. Professor Kim is a member of the State Bar of California and a past recipient of the Wiley W. Manuel Award for pro bono services for her work with the Asian Pacific American Legal Center. 

Professor Kim currently serves as the Secretary of the section on Contracts and as a member of the executive committee of the section on Commercial and Related Consumer Law of the American Association of Law Schools.  She is a contributing editor to the Contracts Law Prof Blog, the official blog for the AALS Section on Contracts. Her scholarly interests focus on culture and the law, contracts, women and the law, and technology. Some of her publications can be found here. 

Scholarly Publications 

• 'WRAP CONTRACTS:  MASS CONSUMER CONTRACTS IN AN INFORMATION SOCIETY (contract with Oxford University Press)
• Contract's Adaptation and the Online Bargain, 79 UNIV. OF CIN. L. REV. 1327 (2011) available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1898828
• "Expanding the Scope of the Principles of the Law of Software Contracts to Include Digital Content," 84 TULANE L. REV. 1595 (2010) available at  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1597366
• "Reasonable Expectations in Socio-Cultural Context," 45 WAKE FOREST L. REV. 641 (2010)
• "Arbitration's Summer Soldiers Marching into Fall:  Another Look at Eisenberg, Miller and Sherwin's Empirical Study of Arbitration Clauses in Consumer and Non-Consumer Contracts," (w/ Chii-Dean Lin), 34 VT. L. REV. 597 (2010)(symposium) available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1580128
• "Website Proprietorship and Online Harassment," 2009 UTAH L. REV. 993 available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1354466
• "Bargaining Power and Background Law," 12 VAND. J. ENT. & TECH. L. 93 (2009) available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1529476
• "Imposing Tort Liability on Websites for Cyber Harassment," 118 YALE L. J. POCKET PART 115 (2008) available at  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1507463
• "The Software Licensing Dilemma," 2008 BYU L. REV. 101
• "Mistakes, Changed Circumstances and Intent," 56 U. KAN. L. REV. 473 (2008) available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1113986
• "Internet Challenges to Business Innovation," 12 J. INTERNET LAW 3 (August 2008) available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1259968
• "Clicking and Cringing,"  86 OR. L. REV. 797 (2007) (selected for Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, 2007) available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1003921
• "Blameworthiness, Intent and Cultural Dissonance: The Unequal Treatment of Cultural Defense Defendants,"  17 U. FLA. J. L. & PUB POL'Y 199 (2006) (symposium) available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=782464
• “Martha Graham, Professor Miller, and the Work for Hire Doctrine:  Undoing the Judicial Bind Created by the Legislature,” 13 J. INTELL. PROP. L. 337 (2006) (reprinted in Thomson West’s ENTERTAINMENT, PUBLISHING AND THE ARTS HANDBOOK, 2007-2008 (ed. Karen Tripp)) available at     http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=771686
• "Evolving Business and Social Norms and Interpretation Rules: The Need for a Dynamic Approach to Contract Disputes," 84 NEB. L. REV. 506 (2005) available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=713962
• “The Cultural Defense and the Problem of Cultural Preemption: A Framework for Analysis,” 27 N. M. L. REV. 101 (1997).
• “Toward a Feminist Theory of Human Rights: Straddling the Fence Between Western Imperialism and Uncritical Absolutism,” 25 COLUM. HUM. RTS. L. REV. 49 (1993).

Selected Presentations

• "Clickwraps, Browsewraps, and Why ESIGN Deserves a Bum Rap," panelist, American Bar Association, Business Law Section, Consumer Financial Services Committee, 2012 Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, August 5, 2012
• "Current Issues in Commercial Contracts:  Transatlantic Perspectives, University of Sheffield, School of Law, Sheffield, United Kingdom, September 9-10, 2011
• "The Role of Contract Design," The Society of Legal Scholars, 102nd Annual Conference, Contract, Commercial and Consumer Law Section, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, September 7-8, 2011
• "Online Form as Function," 2011 AALS Workshop on Women Rethinking Equality, Washington, D.C., June 22, 2011
• 47 U.S.C. section 230:  A 15-Year Retrospective, panelist, Santa Clara Law School, Santa Clara, CA, March 4, 2011
• "Reconceptualizing the Online Bargain", 6th Annual International Conference on Contracts, Stetson University College of Law,  Gulfport, FL, February 18-19, 2011
• "Navigating Lombard Street in a Fog:  Seeking (or Ignoring) Landmarks of Intent and Context, panelist, AALS Contracts section discussion, AALS Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, January 6, 2011
• "Reasonable Expectations in Socio-Cultural Context," Contract Law & Context:  Identity, Power, and Contractual Justice, sponsored by Wake Forest Law Review, Wake Forest School of Law, Winston-Salem, NC, March 26-27, 2010
• "‘Wrap Contracts & Privacy", Intelligent Information Privacy Management Symposium, CodeX:  The Stanford Center of Computers and Law, Stanford University, March 23-25, 2010

• "Contracts as Sword, Shield, Crook and Drawbridge," panelist, Spring Conference on Contracts, William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, February 26-27, 2010

• "The Communications Decency Act:  Has the Overwhelming Success of Section 230 Immunity Imperiled Its Very Existence?", 22^nd Annual Media and the Law Seminar, Kansas City, MO, April 17, 2009

• "Content and the CDA Immunity, Law & Information Society Symposium: Intermediaries in the Information Society", Center on Law and Information Policy, Fordham Law School, New York, NY, March 27, 2009

• "Cyber Harassment and the Rhetoric of Free Speech," TPRC 2008:  The 36^th Research Conference on Communication, Information, and Internet Policy, The National Center for Technology & Law, George Mason University School of Law, Arlington, VA September 26 - September 28, 2008 

• "Clicking and Cringing", Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, Stanford Law School, Palo Alto, CA, May 18-19, 2007

Other Publications

• "Sacrificing privacy to the web gods," op-ed, The San Francisco Chronicle, (March 6, 2008), http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/06/EDENVAIND.DTL
• "Playing by the rules of the cyber playground," op-ed, The Providence Journal, (July 4, 2008)http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_kim4_07-04-08_FDAN168_v20.411deb6.html
• "Bank fees unconscionable," op-ed, The San Diego Union Tribune, October 16, 2009, http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/oct/16/bank-fees-unconscionable/?opinion

nkim@cwsl.edu         
619-525-1693
225 Cedar Street
San Diego, CA 92101

Publications

C.V.