Kaimipono D. Wenger
Associate Professor of Law
Biography
Kaimipono D. Wenger (Kaimi) teaches, writes, and practices in the areas of civil rights law, housing law, and racial justice.
Professor Wenger’s scholarship on racial justice issues discusses legal remedies for large-scale racial harms, especially reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. His work examines how the United States legal system has never provided any remedy for these massive and obvious wrongs, and what this phenomenon illustrates about the limits of the law. His scholarship on housing law examines the role of the legal system in protecting tenants as well as racial justice issues relating to housing.
Professor Wenger’s legal scholarship includes articles in the Wisconsin Law Review, American University Law Review, Loyola L.A. Law Review, and UCLA Law Review Discourse, among others, as well as a book chapter in Injury and Injustice: The Cultural Politics of Harm and Redress (Cambridge University Press 2017). He has been quoted in media including the Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, Salt Lake Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Slate, Jurist, The Daily Beast, and LAist.
Prior to joining the California Western faculty, Professor Wenger worked at the nonprofit Inner City Law Center (ICLC) in Los Angeles, where he represented hundreds of low-income tenants in their eviction cases, took about twenty cases to trial, and supervised other attorneys. He was attorney of record on appellate cases confirming tenant rights, including Yanez v. Vasquez, 65 Cal.App.5th Supp. 1 (2021), and Alonso v. Herrera, 117 Cal.App.5th Supp. 12 (2025). While working at ICLC, Professor Wenger founded the Eviction Defense Clinic at Southwestern Law School, where he taught eviction defense law and supervised law student clinical work.
Prior to working at ICLC, Professor Wenger taught at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, where he directed the Center for Law and Social Justice, and was twice voted Professor of the Year by students. He also taught as a visiting professor at University of San Diego and University of Nice, France.
Professor Wenger is a graduate of Columbia University School of Law and clerked for Judge Jack B. Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York.
- J.D., Columbia University School of Law
- B.A., Arizona State University
- Legal Skills I
- Legal Skills II
- Flattening the Eviction Curve: Lessons from Los Angeles About Tenant Defense During a Pandemic. 2 Loyola Interdisciplinary Journal of Public Interest Law 1 (2025).
- Civil Remedies for Racial Trauma. White paper, Civil Justice Research Initiative (University of California, Berkeley), with Lucas Bainbridge. October 2023.
- 1200 Dollars and a Mule: COVID-19, the CARES Act, and Reparations for Slavery, 68 UCLA L. Rev. Discourse 204 (2020).
- Environmental Justice Reparations for Jeju Island, 7 World Env. & Island Studies 95 (2018) (with Kath Rogers)
- “The Unconscionable Impossibility of Reparations for Slavery; or, Why the Master’s Mules will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Injury and Injustice: The Cultural Politics of Harm and Redress (Cambridge University Press 2017) (Anne Bloom, David Engel & Michael McCann eds.)
- “40 Acres and a Lawsuit: Legal Claims for Reparations,” in Race, Ethnicity and Law (Elsevier 2016) (Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance series)
- “The Divine Institution of Marriage”: A Short Overview of LDS Statements Regarding Proposition 8, 26 J. Civ. Rts & Econ. Dev. 705 (2012).
- From Radical to Practical (and Back Again?): Reparations, Rhetoric, and Revolution, Journal of Civil Rights & Economic Development (2011)
- Too Big to Remedy? Rethinking Restitution for Slavery and Jim Crow, 43 Loyola L.A. L. Rev. 177 (2010)
- Apology Lite: Truths, Doubts, and Reconciliations in the Senate’s Guarded Apology for Slavery, 42 Connecticut Law Review CONNtemplations 1 (2009)
- Reparations Within the Rule of Law, 29 Thomas Jefferson Law Review 231 (2007).
- Causation and Attenuation in the Slavery Reparations Debate, 40 University of San Francisco Law Review 279 (2006).
- Nullificatory Juries, 2004 Wisconsin Law Review 1115 (2004) (with David A. Hoffman)
- Slavery as a Takings Clause Violation, 53 American University Law Review 191 (2003)