Zimring was born on December 2, 1942, in Los Angeles, California,[2] to television and film writer Maurice Zimring, better known by his stage name Maurice Zimm, and his wife Molly, a lawyer who passed the California Bar in 1933.

[3] Zimring joined the faculty of the UC Berkeley School of Law in 1983 as director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute, a position he held until 2002.

[13] Zimring has said that a proposed exemption to the California law banning local communities from regulating guns, but only in Oakland, could "test the waters of local control and to see whether the political process that produces city-level gun policy can get inclusive and responsible, and whether it can get specific and selective in ways that can solve the problem.

"[14] In a 2015 opinion piece in the New York Daily News, he criticized claims by Heather Mac Donald that the Ferguson effect was responsible for a recent increase in crime rates in the United States, calling the proposed effect "fiction" and said that the evidence at the time suggested that there was "probably not" a "nationwide crime wave" of the sort Mac Donald claimed existed.

In 1995, he received the Donald Cressey Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.