Kaiponanea Matsumura is a scholar in the areas of family law and race and the law. Matsumura is a co-founder and co-organizer of the Roundtable on Nonmarriage and the Law, which brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars interested in studying nonmarital relationships. He has also co-chaired the Family Law Scholars and Teachers Conference, and is the co-section editor of the Family Law section of JOTWELL. He is currently serving as the Reporter for the Uniform Law Commission project, Ownership or Possession of Pets at Family Dissolution and Other Related Issues.
Matsumura is a co-founder of the West Coast Sexuality, Gender, and the Law Conference, which brings together legal scholars from across the country to share impactful new scholarship in gender, sexuality, and the law. The inaugural conference was held on the LMU Loyola Law School campus in 2024. His other recent presentations have included the International Academy of Law & Mental Health Conference at the University of Barcelona; the Race, Racism, and the Law Convening at Harvard Law School; and faculty workshops at Washington University and UC Irvine.
Matsumura recently published “The Illusion of Stability in Family Law” and “Asian Americans and the Harm of Exceptionalized Inclusion“ in the Vanderbilt and Cornell flagship law reviews and an article in the peer-reviewed Social Issues and Policy Review that provides a research and policy guide for psychologists studying consensual non-monogamy. He is currently working on chapters for “Race, Racism, and the Law” and the “Oxford Handbook on Families and the Law,” as well as an article on the U.S. Army’s treatment of marriages between Japanese and non-Japanese people during World War II.
Other scholarship includes articles on the private ordering and the legal regulation of nonmarital relationships in some of the top law reviews, including “Unifying Status and Contract” (UC Davis Law Review), “The Marital Habitus“ (Washington University Law Review), and “Beyond Polygamy” (Iowa Law Review). He is also co-author of Contemporary Family Law (6th ed. 2023).
Matsumura received his B.S. magna cum laude from Northwestern University and his J.D. from UCLA School of Law, where he graduated Order of the Coif and was chief articles editor of the UCLA Law Review. After law school, he clerked for the Hon. A. Wallace Tashima on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, California, before working as a litigator at a large law firm in its San Francisco office. He was then a Thomas C. Grey Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, and a tenured associate professor of law at Arizona State University. A professor and William M. Rains Fellow at LMU Loyola Law School since 2022, he teaches “Contracts,” “Family Law,” and “Asian Americans and the Law.”