Anna R. Kirkland, PhD, JD

Professor Kirkland works on the law and politics of health discrimination, insurance coverage, sexual harassment, and related topics. Professor Kirkland's ongoing research project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is an investigation into the implementation and politics of Section 1557, the non-discrimination clause of the Affordable Care Act that protects patients from discrimination in health care settings, with a focus on transgender discrimination.

Anna Kirkland is the Kim Lane Scheppele Collegiate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. She is also an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor. She received her law degree (2001) and Ph.D in Jurisprudence and Social Policy (2003) from the University of California, Berkeley. She holds courtesy appointments with Sociology, Political Science, and Health Management and Policy at Michigan. Prof. Kirkland is a member of Michigan’s Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation and served as a committee member on the National Academies panel charged with studying sexual harassment in the STEM fields of academia. From 2017 to 2022 she directed the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, a unit of the UM Office of Research.

Prof. Kirkland’s third book, Health Care Civil Rights: How Discrimination Law Fails Patients will be published by the University of California Press in April 2024 and will be available open access on the UC Press Luminos platform. Discrimination law could be a powerful response to health inequalities in the U.S. But using civil rights law in healthcare settings is difficult because our healthcare system is complex, fragmented, and tuned to other priorities. The troubles with civil rights in health care reveal deep divides and competing interests that reverberate through patient experiences, insurance claims, and courtroom arguments. Prof. Kirkland explains what health care civil rights are, how they are supposed to work to protect against discrimination based on gender identity, how they work in practice at all levels, and how to strengthen them. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation and open access was made possible by a TOME publishing grant (UM Library, LSA, and OVPR).

Prof. Kirkland is also a co-editor with stef shuster and Carla Pfeffer of the Social Science and Medicine Special Issue “Unequal Care: Trans Medicine and Health in Dangerous Times” (October 2024) and the author of Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood (New York University Press, 2008) and Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury (New York University Press, 2016), co-editor with Jonathan Metzl of Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality (New York University Press, 2010), and co-editor with with Prof. Marie-Andree Jacob at the University of Leeds, UK of a Research Handbook on Sociolegal Studies of Medicine and Health (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020).

Prof. Kirkland teaches courses on health discrimination at the law school and gender and the law and health policy in Women's and Gender Studies.