Kaiponanea Matsumura

Kaipo Matsumura’s primary research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of family law and contract law. His research focuses on how the law accommodates, shapes, and sometimes ignores individual preferences in its regulation of intimate relationships and the family. His recent work has focused on the regulation of adult intimate relationships through status, both as a descriptive matter and from the perspective of optimizing status-based approaches. He has also written extensively about the enforceability of agreements between people in intimate relationships. His scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the Washington University Law Review, William & Mary Law Review, UCLA Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, U.C. Davis Law Review, and Fordham Law Review, among others.

Professor Matsumura teaches Contracts, Civil Procedure, Family Law, and a seminar on Assisted Reproductive Technologies. In 2017, and again in 2019, the graduating class selected him as the recipient of ASU Law's Outstanding Teaching Award.  

Matsumura has organized several conferences, including the Family Law Scholars and Teachers Conference, the Roundtable on Nonmarriage and the Law, and the AALS Pretenured Law Teachers of Color workshop. In 2020, he began serving a three-year term on the AALS Committee for the Recruitment and Retention of Minority Law Teachers and Students. He is also a section editor and former contributing editor of JOTWELL's Family Law section, and has been a frequent lecturer at the Arizona State Bar Conference and Arizona Judicial Conference on family law topics.

Matsumura joined the ASU law faculty in 2014 after spending three years teaching at Stanford Law School as a Thomas C. Grey Fellow. He previously practiced with the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. Before entering private practice, Professor Matsumura served as a law clerk to the Honorable A. Wallace Tashima of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. 

Professor Matsumura graduated from UCLA School of Law, where he served as Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, earned the Jerry Pacht Memorial Constitutional Law Award, and was elected to the Order of the Coif. Before law school, Professor Matsumura spent four years teaching high school English in Santa Monica, California.