Meg Gould, a Columbia Law graduate born and raised in Memphis Tennessee, joined the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project this summer as an Elizabeth Zitrin Justice Fellow. During her two-year tenure, Gould expects to advance CRRJ’s Posthumous Exonerations project, and return to classroom and clinical teaching in spring 2026.
“I hope and expect to be very energized by this fellowship, both by the skills I’m going to learn as practitioner and from working with students and everything that they teach you,” said Gould, in a recent interview with CRRJ.
It is expected that her research will focus on the intersection of race and capital punishment, advancing the CRRJ’s examination into instances of racialized, state-sanctioned executions. “It is a historic issue that informs the application of the death penalty today,” she said. “There has not been enough research on those cases, examining how frequently they occurred, and the racial impact on convictions for crimes Black individuals did not commit.”
Gould hopes her work will go some way to filling this historical and legal void. “The research is itself an important outcome, creating a more accurate and complete public record, working with descendants and communities to figure out what redress or remedy looks like for them. I hope to produce tangible research for them to work with, and I think that we will.”
Gould will also teach CRRJ’s Spring Clinic, alongside CRRJ Staff Attorney Raymond Wilkes, next year. But she’s not staying behind her desk this fall. Gould will collaborate with CRRJ Founder and Director Professor Margaret Burnham and CRRJ Program Director and Staff Attorney Alex Stein ’19 to launch a directed study this fall. The directed study will focus on litigation and the community strategies needed to fight for accountability against police violence. This, she said, is the first project of its kind to be offered at Northeastern Law.
“I wanted to keep serving as an advocate, working on real cases involving real people, but I wanted to do so with enough time to conduct a thorough investigation, in ways that equip the next generation of civil rights litigators to think about these issues more holistically, which is what CRRJ does.”
The Elizabeth Zitrin Justice Fellowship was established by the Zitrin Foundation of San Francisco in 2016, to support work that seeks to create meaningful criminal legal reforms. Elizabeth Zitrin ’79 is the former president of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, and vice chair of Witness to Innocence.
Gould’s own career has focused largely on the abolition of capital punishment, domestically and internationally. It was through her work with The Death Penalty Project that Gould heard of Elizabeth Zitrin.
Gould earned her undergraduate degree in Global Development Studies and French from the University of Virginia, graduating in 2015, before travelling to Botswana as a Princeton in Africa Fellow to teach elementary-grade math.
“I was so energized by being in a classroom and connecting with students, but I felt like my interest in teaching could be applied more directly towards issues I cared about,” she said.
And so, Gould returned to Charlottesville and UVA to work in leadership development and education policy. During her two years in this role, she volunteered with UVA’s Resilience Education, teaching financial literacy in Virginia’s prisons. Resilience Education connects university business school students with incarcerated individuals trapped in cycles of debt, often the victims of predatory credit companies and misleading financial information. “Through those classes I realized I wanted to be more involved in advocacy and to build the skills required to represent those people, addressing the root issues before these individuals become incarcerated,” she said.
Gould enrolled at Columbia Law in 2018, where she earned her JD while establishing a program that was inspired by her work with Resilience Education. The Paralegal Pathways Initiative, co-developed by Gould and Devon Simmons—still its Director—in her first semester at Columbia, is designed to help formally incarcerated individuals find careers within the legal profession.
“Formally incarcerated individuals have experience being the subject of it, but they also learn a lot about the criminal legal system,” said Gould. “If we can help them refine their skills, they can be employed by a legal advocacy group, public defender’s office, legal organization, or wherever they can contribute something unique and use skills they have already built.”
Participants of the Paralegal Pathways Initiative earn a certificate for completing the program and are connected with potential employers. Upon graduating in 2021, it had grown from a fledgling program to a fully viable and sustainable model, said Gould, and it continues with its anti-recidivism mission, under Simmons’ leadership, to this day.
Gould also joined Columbia’s Human Rights Clinic, focusing on cases involving issues of transitional justice and government accountability in the Central African Republic. She learned how to conduct trauma-informed interviews with the families of victims of state violence. She worked in Sierra Leone, representing a woman sentenced to death under the country’s mandatory death penalty for murder. After law school and through her continuing work with the DPP, Gould also fought for legislative reform to end the use of capital punishment in Ghana and Taiwan.
Following law school, Gould spent two years clerking in Memphis for Chief Judge Sheryl H. Lipman of U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee, and for Judge Julia Smith Gibbons of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit. She worked on a variety of cases, from those involving police misconduct to anti-trust litigation.
“Both are amazing women, amazing thinkers,” said Gould. “[Clerking for them] taught me the importance of effective, thorough, detail-oriented advocacy… They were intentional about deciding important legal issues based on the facts before them and taking a close look at what the law said. It was a great chance to see courtroom litigation and clarified for me that there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. The law needs to change in a lot of ways, so I was excited to become a litigator.”
In 2023, Gould joined Chicago-based law firm Loevy & Loevy, who litigate primarily civil rights cases involving police misconduct, wrongful convictions, false arrest, prisoners’ rights and the use of excessive force. She was living in Memphis when Tyre Nichols was killed by police officers, beaten during a traffic stop on January 7, 2023.
“That was a real call to this type of work, seeking accountability for the actions of police officers who take advantage of their positions and can ruin the lives of people in their own communities,” said Gould.
During her time at Loevy & Loevy, Gould worked on many wrongful conviction cases that resulted from police misconduct, recreating narratives and creating more complete, accurate representations of the facts. Providing this historical context for her clients, she said, is parallel to her forthcoming work at CRRJ.
“That type of experience is very aligned with what CRRJ does,” she said. “CRRJ takes it a step further in the history it’s considering and researching, but it too requires developing a more complete story over the last 100 years and understanding how to collect those stories from people and communities who were harmed, uncovering documents that often no one has ever seen before. That level of detailed and thorough storytelling is so unique,” she said.
“There’s a lot of room for advocates to push the law in a way that can expand protections for people who have been disenfranchised or harmed by the current legal system,” said Gould, who has made this her career, and intends to bring the same aspirations to Northeastern Law students.
“For me, joining CRRJ is a chance to return to the classroom and clinical education, with a substantive focus,” she said “…talking about state violence and its historical legacies, and importantly, providing students with the tools to uncover that.”
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