Research Fellow, Stanford Criminal Justice Center

Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Sentencing & Corrections, Islamic Law

W. David Ball is an Assistant Professor. His main scholarly interests are sentencing, corrections, and the intersection of mental illness and criminal justice. His article, "Heinous, Atrocious, and Cruel: Apprendi, Indeterminate Sentencing, and the Meaning of Punishment" appeared in the June 2009 issue of the Columbia Law Review and was described by Professor Douglas Berman as meriting "a place on any top ten list of must-read pieces concerning the Supreme Court’s modern sentencing jurisprudence."

Ball spent two years as a Research Fellow at the Stanford Center for Criminal Justice looking at the ways in which data and operations integration at the state and local level can improve criminal justice outcomes in California. He programmed and facilitated a year-long series of Executive Sessions with criminal justice practitioners from across the state to analyze various aspects of integrated criminal justice, including the use of Risk-Needs Assessments and inter-agency coordination during a prisoner's first 72 hours of release. He was also the Social Justice Teaching Fellow at Santa Clara during the 2007-2008 academic year.

Ball is a graduate of Stanford Law School and a former clerk of the Honorable John T. Noonan, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a Rhodes Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford. Between Oxford and law school, he was an improvisational comedian and independent filmmaker in New York City. Film Professor Ray Carney called his film Honey "one of the great contemporary works of art."

 Curriculum Vitae download (pdf format)