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Ralph Richard Banks

American legal academic

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 16, 2026
Entity authorityQ7288010
Source-derived summary

Ralph Richard Banks (born December 11, 1964) is a professor at Stanford Law School, where he has taught since 1998. He also teaches at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. His scholarship focuses on race, inequality and the law. He published the book Is Marriage for White People?: How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone in 2011.

Early life and education

Ralph Richard Banks grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and graduated from University School in 1983. He then enrolled at Stanford University, where he received both bachelor's and master's degrees in 1987. He received his J.D. degree, cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1994.

After graduating from Stanford, Banks wrote regularly about race, culture, and inequality for a wide array of newspapers, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), the Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Denver Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others.

After graduating from law school, Banks practiced law at the San Francisco office of O'Melveny & Myers.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ralph Richard Banks” as american legal academic. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1964, 1998, 2011, 1983—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1964-12-11. The account is most persuasive where Ralph, Richard and Banks can be independently traced.
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Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as american legal academic. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7288010. VIAF identifies the subject as 7342821. The Library of Congress control number is nr2004031833. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964, 1998, 2011 and 1983.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Ralph Richard Banks” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.