Professor W. David Ball works primarily in the field of criminal justice, writing and teaching in the areas of criminal law, criminal procedure, sentencing and corrections. His articles have been published in the Columbia Law Review, the NYU Law Review, the Yale Law and Policy Review, and the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He is the co-author (with Michelle Oberman) of an open-source criminal law casebook.

Ball has been Co-Chair of the Corrections Committee of the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section for more than a decade. He has also served as the Chair of the Public Safety Working Group for Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Law and Policy and was a member of the Santa Clara County Alternatives to Incarceration Taskforce.

Prior to becoming a full time member of the Santa Clara University School of Law faculty in 2009, Ball served as a Social Justice Teaching Fellow at Santa Clara, a Research Fellow at the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, and a law clerk for the Honorable John T. Noonan, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. Before law school he was an actor, writer, and filmmaker in New York City. He graduated with highest distinction from the University of North Carolina, where he was a Morehead-Cain Scholar, and got a second BA from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. In his spare time, he enjoys traveling, photography, and playing with his cat-sized dogs, Nellie and Iris.