Faculty Directory
  • Adjunct Faculty
  • Online Faculty

Emily Gould

Titles

  • Adjunct Professor

Degrees

  • JD, Northeastern University

Biography

Emily Gould is faculty for Global Restorative Justice, an online offering at Vermont Law School that focuses on the country of Rwanda and how it employed restorative justice to recover from the genocide of 1994. Professor Gould serves as a law reform consultant to Rwanda on the issue of alternative dispute resolution, including mediation and restorative justice.  Funded by the JAMS foundation, the Netherlands and the European Union, this consultancy additionally focuses on creating trauma – informed justice procedures. She is a co-founder of African Peace Partners, a U.S. non-profit that supports community mediation in Rwanda. Her work in Rwanda began as a project of Mediators Beyond Borders International, of which she is a founding member.

In June 2020, the Ministry of Justice of Rwanda adopted an ADR policy authored by Professor Gould for the Institute of Legal Practice and Development in Kigali. The policy will be considered by the President’s Cabinet for adoption by the country in the summer of 2020. In June of 2020, Professor Gould was the recipient of the Donald MacRae Peace Award from Rotary International for her work in Rwanda.

In her legal career, Gould served as an Assistant District Attorney for Middlesex County, MA, Director of the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit in the Vermont Office of the Attorney General, and General Counsel to the Vermont Agency of Agriculture.  Over the last 15 years, she has mediated a wide range of disputes across many sectors including commercial enterprises, non-profit organizations, employment, agriculture, education, family and public policy. She has served as an assistant panel member of the Vermont Board of Professional Responsibility, is a past section chair of the Association for Conflict Resolution and Dispute Resolution Section of the Vermont Bar Association.

In addition to Vermont Law School, Professor Gould has been a lecturer in law and associate research scholar at Columbia Law School in the field of lawyer leadership development. She was among those at CLS who created and delivered a flagship course in Columbia Law School’s Leadership Initiative, Lawyer Leadership: Leading Self, Leading Others, Leading Change, a 5-credit experiential course offered for the first time in 2018. She also teaches law reform and policy development in Rwanda at Columbia Law School.

When she is not teaching or working in Rwanda, Professor Gould works as a leadership development coach, consultant and trainer to lawyers, law firms and legal institutions. She authored The Empathy Debate: The role of Empathy in Law, Mediation, and the New Professionalism in the Vermont Bar Journal (Fall, 2010) and graduated from Barnard College and Northeastern University Law School. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont.

Expertise

  • Restorative Justice

Departments

  • Center for Justice Reform

Courses Taught

  • Global Restorative Justice
  • New Approaches to Domestic and Sexual Violence