Kristine S. Knaplund
Professor of Law
B.A., Oberlin College, 1974
J.D., University of California, Davis, 1977
View a list of Professor Knaplund's recent writings
Professor Kristine S. Knaplund began her career in law teaching in 1983 at UCLA Law School, where she was honored with the law school’s Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1991, the University-wide Harriet and Charles Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award in 1995, and the 1997 graduating class’ Professor of the Year Award. She joined the faculty of Pepperdine University School of Law in 2002, and teaches Property, Wills and Trusts, Advanced Wills and Trusts, and the Bioethics Seminar. In 2006 she received the 1L Professor of the Year Award.
Professor Knaplund currently serves as chair of the ABA Committee on Bioethics, and spoke at the ABA Spring Symposium for the Section of Real Property, Trust & Estate Law in May 2008 on “The Fertile Octogenarian Revisited: Romance Late in Life and the Right To Physical Intimacy in the Nursing Home.” She has served on the board of trustees of the Law School Admission Council, and also been active for many years on the LSAC Minority Affairs Committee and the LSAC Test Development and Research Committee. Before moving to Los Angeles, she practiced law with Queens Legal Services in New York City and with a private law firm in New York and Washington, D.C., primarily in the area of plaintiffs' Title VII employment discrimination. She has also served as a full-time volunteer attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York. She is a member of the New York bar, and also a member of the Estate Planning, Trust and Probate Section of the California bar. Her most recent article is “The Evolution of Women’s Rights in Inheritance,” 19 Hastings Women’s Law Journal 3 (Winter 2008). Other articles include “Grandparents Raising Grandchildren and the Implications for Inheritance,” 48 Arizona Law Review 1 (Spring 2006), “Equal Protection, Postmortem Conception and Intestacy,” 53 Kansas Law Review 627 (April 2005), and “Postmortem Conception and A Father’s Last Will,” 46 Arizona Law Review 91 (Spring 2004).
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