Russell Gold joined the University of Alabama School of Law faculty in 2020. In 2024, Professor Gold received the Outstanding Faculty Member Award from the Student Bar Association. He previously taught at Wake Forest University School of Law and the NYU Lawyering Program. During his time at NYU, Professor Gold received the Podell Distinguished Teaching Award. Before teaching, Professor Gold worked in private practice at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher where he focused on class action and appellate matters. After law school he clerked for the Honorable Carlos F. Lucero on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Professor Gold earned his J.D. from George Washington University where he graduated summa cum laude and served as the Senior Notes Editor for The George Washington Law Review. He earned a B.S. in Economics and a B.A. in Political Science from Arizona State University.
Much of Professor Gold’s scholarship looks comparatively at civil and criminal procedure, considering insights that each system can learn from the other. His scholarship has recently appeared in journals including Georgetown Law Journal, Arizona State Law Journal, and the Alabama Law Review. His scholarship can be found here: http://ssrn.com/author=860781. He co-edited the Oxford Handbook on Prosecutors and Prosecution.
Scholarship
Exoneration Finance
The path to financial compensation for the wrongfully convicted can be complex and time-consuming. Exonerees often struggle to make ends meet and function in free society, let alone navigate a serpentine process while waiting years for the recovery they deserve. Securing the assistance of an attorney is often a critical step, but too few lawyers are willing to risk taking these complicated cases…The Price of Criminal Law
Should tax dollars pay for more criminal law, better public schools, or a new community center? Different counties will answer the question differently, but facing these tradeoffs is profoundly important to democratic governance. Nonetheless, because the criminal legal system diffuses power and hides and offloads costs, officials and voters do not have to…The Public Voice of the Defender
For decades police and prosecutors have controlled the public narrative about criminal law—littering the news landscape with salacious stories of violent crimes while ignoring the more mundane but far more prevalent minor cases that clog the court dockets. Defenders, faced with overwhelming caseloads and fear that speaking out may harm their clients, have largely ceded the opportunity to offer a…Volunteer Prosecutors
As support has grown to reduce the footprint of criminal law by defunding the police, volunteer prosecution—a practice that has garnered little attention—continues to expand criminal law’s footprint. Volunteer prosecutors come in many different forms, but their core similarity is that they all prosecute crime without getting paid. Some are entry-level lawyers seeking to gain a foothold in the…Power Over Procedure
American law should better protect people’s bodies from being caged than it should protect people’s money. And yet in so many ways it does the opposite. Instead of calibrating protections for defendants to the importance of the interest at stake, disparities between pretrial protections in federal civil and criminal procedure instead track differences in race and class between defendants in the…