Anna Kirkland

Anna Kirkland is a scholar who writes about contemporary problems in law and health policy in the United States and how we might solve them. Prof. 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, an honor for excellence in undergraduate teaching. 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 Law, Sociology, Political Science, and Health Management and Policy at Michigan. Her classes at Michigan are about gender and law, health policy, and health discrimination.

Prof. Kirkland’s third book, Health Care Civil Rights: How Discrimination Law Fails Patients (University of California Press 2025) is available open access on the UC Press Luminos platform. What does it mean to bring civil rights into healthcare? 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. Health care civil rights also often suffer political and legal defeat. The troubles with civil rights in health care reveal deep divides and competing interests that reverberate through patient experiences, insurance claims, and courtroom arguments. In this new book, 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.

Prof. Kirkland is also 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).

Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury will be re-released with a new Preface and Epilogue in 2026. The new edition will take stock of the post-COVID era in vaccine law and politics and re-assess the vaccine injury compensation system in light of the new challenges to it under the Trump administration.