Ralph Richard Banks (born December 11, 1964) is a professor at Stanford Law School, where he has taught since 1998.
After graduating from Stanford, Banks wrote regularly about race, culture, and inequality for a wide array of newspapers, including The New York Times,[3] the Los Angeles Times,[4] the Chicago Tribune, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), the Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Denver Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others.
After leaving private practice, Banks served as the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School, where he wrote "The Color of Desire: Fulfilling Adoptive Parents' Racial Preferences Through Discriminatory State Action."
Banks' research addresses issues related to race and inequality across a variety of domains, from criminal justice, to employment, to the family.
Ralph Richard Banks lives with his wife, Jennifer Eberhardt, a prominent social psychologist,[9] Stanford University faculty member and Macarthur Grant awardee,[10] and their three children (Everett, Ebbie, and Harlan) in the San Francisco Bay Area.