About Our Founder

Camille Gear Rich

Associate Provost for Faculty and Student Initiatives in the Social Sciences, and Professor of Law and Sociology

Camille Gear Rich joined the USC Gould School of Law faculty in the fall of 2007 following five years of private practice. Her research and teaching interests include constitutional law, feminist legal theory, family law, children and the law and the First Amendment. She is the founder and director of PRYSM: The USC Initiative for the Study of Race, Gender, Sexuality and the Law. She is also the founding director of Gould's First Generation Legal Professionals program. Rich is widely know for her research on law, discrimination and identity formation issues related to race, class, gender and sexuality. Rich was a visiting professor at Stanford Law School in Winter/Spring of 2017. She will be a visiting professor at Yale Law School in Spring 2019.

Rich is also the associate provost for student and faculty initiatives in the social sciences. She has served in that role since 2016, and she holds the title of provost-level diversity liaison. While serving as associate provost she co-founded Diversity and Inclusion Awareness Week, an education series that has grown into a 68 event program that provides a range of diversity-related training sessions to the USC community. Additionally she was co-founder of Wicked Problems Practicuum, a cross-school program that invites graduate students from various programs to create think-tanks that partner with community and government agencies to collaborate on solving wicked problems affecting global mega-cities. She also launched the cross-school First Generation Professionals Program, which brings FGP students from across USC’s 19 schools together to share resources and experiences.

Rich graduated with honors from Brown University in 1993. She graduated from Yale Law School in 1998 and was a senior editor on the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. She was awarded a postgraduate research fellowship at Yale Law School, during which she began her research on ways that antidiscrimination laws can better accommodate the shifting contingent nature of racial and ethnic identity.

Prior to entering private practice, Rich clerked in the Southern District of New York for District Judge Robert L. Carter. She also clerked on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals for Circuit Judge Rosemary Barkett. She joined Debevoise & Plimpton, LLP in 2003, where she worked primarily on general commercial litigation and internal investigations. Rich also worked on various pro bono matters involving Title VII retaliation claims and disability rights. Her primary pro bono project was her work as co-counsel with the Legal Aid Society Prisoners Rights Project on a prisoners’ rights class action raising constitutional claims on behalf of all female prisoners in New York State prisons against New York State Department of Corrections officials. Plaintiffs challenged various prison staffing, supervision and training policies that created an unreasonable risk for female prisoners of sexual abuse by male corrections officers. Professor Rich was awarded the Legal Aid Society Pro Bono Award in recognition of her work on prisoners’ rights claims.