Professor Richards' work focuses on government respect for human rights. One of his primary interests is human rights measurement, and he is Co-Director of the CIRI Human Rights Data Project (www.humanrightsdata.org), which annually rates government respect for 15 internationally-recognized human rights in 195 countries.

He has published research studying government respect for human rights in a variety of journals and books. This research utilizes a variety of lenses through which to examine respect for human rights, including economic globalization, democratic institutions such as national elections and political parties, banking crises, the end of the Cold War, and information globalization.

Among his most recent research projects are: a global study of violence against women;  several studies of the distribution and formation of citizen attitudes towards human rights, particularly torture, both globally and within the United States, specifically; an examination of the de jure and de facto status of non-derogable human rights; and the measurement of effort to respect economic human rights .

His work has been funded multiple times by the National Science Foundation and The World Bank, among others. Recently, Professor Richards served on the advisory board for UNIFEM's Progress of the World's Women: 2008 report. Currently, he is the 2009 Gladstein Visiting Professor of Human Rights at the University of Connecticut.

Professor Richards teaches classes on comparative politics, international relations, research methods, and political film. He joined the faculty at the University of Memphis in 2005. He received his Ph.D. in 1999 from Binghamton University, SUNY.