Faculty & Staff
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Shani M. King Associate Professor; Co-Director, Center on Children and Families P.O. Box 117625 / Gainesville, FL 32611-7625 e-mail: kings@law.ufl.edu 352-273-0951 / Fax: 352-392-3005 |
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Biography
Shani M. King is an associate professor of law and Co-Director of the law school’s Center on Children and Families. He received a B.A. from Brown University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and will be conferred an Mst. in International Human Rights Law from Oxford University in 2012. Following law school, he was a Harvard Sheldon Knox Traveling Fellow with EDUCA, a not-for-profit organization in the Dominican Republic that was conducting an analysis of a major educational reform effort. Afterward, Professor King practiced securities litigation and white-collar criminal defense at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson and Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Iason & Silberberg in New York City. Just prior to joining the faculty at the College of Law, Professor King practiced at Legal Services for Children, Inc. in San Francisco, California, where he litigated cases under the United Nations Convention Against Torture and represented children in immigration, dependency, guardianship, and school discipline proceedings.
Professor King has been active in local, regional and national child welfare and juvenile reform, serving on the board of the Youth Law Center and the Florida Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Children, and on the advisory board of Florida Children’s First. Professor King teaches and writes in the area of children’s rights and family law, with a particular interest the role of child’s counsel in various contexts, and more generally in the rights of children and families, especially those from traditionally underserved populations and the public responsibility to protect those rights. His past and forthcoming publications appear in the Ohio State Law Journal, the Harvard Human Rights Journal, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, the Michigan Journal of International Law, the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, and the Clearinghouse Review Journal of Poverty Law and Policy.
Professor King is currently writing about the right to and the role of child’s counsel in immigration proceedings. He is also working on a book that explores how family law’s failure to account for the legal, social and economic realities of families undermines the ability of families to maintain autonomy over important family decisions. The book explores the extent to which legal protections for families vary with race, physical and mental ability and mental health, socioeconomic status, immigration status, gender, and sexual orientation.