University of Virginia School of Law
Kimberly D. Krawiec
Charles O. Gregory Professor of Law and
Glynn Family Bicentennial Professor of Law
University of Virginia School of Law
About
Kimberly D. Krawiec studies the things we are not supposed to trade — but often do anyway.
Her research examines taboo and repugnant transactions, including markets for human organs, blood and plasma, eggs and other reproductive material, and sex work, alongside a long-running body of work on contracts, corporate governance, and the regulation of financial markets. Across these fields she asks how societies decide which exchanges are permitted, which are forbidden, and what happens at the contested boundary in between.
She is the Charles O. Gregory Professor of Law and the Glynn Family Bicentennial Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. Before joining Virginia in 2021, she was the Kathrine Robinson Everett Professor of Law at Duke University, and she has taught at the University of North Carolina, the University of Oregon, and the University of Tulsa, with visiting appointments at Harvard, Georgetown, Penn, UCLA, Northwestern, and USC, among others. She began her career as an attorney in the Commodity and Derivatives Group at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, and holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. from North Carolina State University.
She is the host and creator of Taboo Trades, a podcast about the markets we find hard to stomach, and writes regularly for wider audiences on her Substack and elsewhere.
Podcast
Taboo Trades
A podcast about things we aren’t supposed to trade… but do anyway. Conversations with scholars, practitioners, and provocateurs on organ markets, repugnance, and the moral limits of exchange.
Selected recent writing
All publications →- 2026 Repugnant Work
- 2025 The Case for Specific Performance of Personal Service Contracts
- 2025 Vice Capital
- 2023 Markets, Repugnance, and Externalities