Emily Gerrick

Senior Associate

Emily Gerrick

Emily is an experienced attorney and advocate whose work has helped hundreds of thousands of people.

Emily joined Gerstein Harrow as a senior associate in 2022. Before coming to Gerstein Harrow, she was a managing attorney and policy director at the Texas Fair Defense Project,where she worked on high-impact cases challenging unconstitutional bail and detention practices and represented individual clients who had been unconstitutionally arrested, jailed, and brutalized by the State. She also drafted and successfully advocated for major legislation that helped hundreds of thousands of people affected by court debt, driver’s license suspensions, and marijuana criminalization.

Emily graduated from Yale Law School, where she was the student-director of the Lowenstein Human Rights Clinic’s Detention Project and a member of the Capital Punishment Clinic. As a law student, she argued in front of the Connecticut Supreme Court as amicus curiae. She received her undergraduate degree from UCLA, graduating summa cum laude with multiple awards and honors.

Representative Matters Include

  • Vela v. Lewis, No. 4:23-CV-03376, 2024 WL 990058 (S.D. Tex. Mar. 6, 2024): Civil rights action against Harris County law enforcement officers who assaulted our senior client and then intentionally framed him for a criminal offense in an effort to cover up their own excessive force. Motion to dismiss denied.

  • Roe v. Amgen, Inc., No. 2:23-CV-07448-MCS-SSC (C.D. Cal. Oct. 10, 2024): Class action lawsuit on behalf of patients whose private medical information was disclosed by Amgen, a pharmaceutical giant, to third parties through tracking pixels that Amgen secretly embedded and configured on its website. Motion to dismiss invasion of privacy claims and claims under the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act denied.

  • Rivera v. Villarreal, No. 5:23-cv-01394 (W.D. Tex.): Class action lawsuit on behalf of hundreds of people who were arrested pursuant to Operation Lone Star, denied their right to counsel, and jailed for weeks or months past their mandatory release dates. Case is pending in the Western District of Texas.

  • Ex Parte Romero, No. 144163101010 (230th D. Tex. 2020): Won a habeas writ that successfully argued that Texas Governor Greg Abbot’s Executive Order GA-13 was unconstitutional, resulting in the release of over 40 people who were being unlawfully detained in the Harris County jail.

  • Daves v. Dallas Cnty., Tex., 22 F.4th 522 (5th Cir. 2022): Co-counseled with Civil Rights Corps, the ACLU, and the ACLU of Texas on this class action lawsuit challenging Dallas County's bail system as unconstitutional. Helped to secure a preliminary injunction in district court that was later vacated and remanded for reconsideration by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in light of new legislation.

  • Salinas v. State, 523 S.W.3d 103 (Tex. Crim. App. 2017): Filed an amicus brief that first introduced the argument that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ultimately relied on to invalidate as unconstitutional two statutory fees that were being charged to every person convicted of a crime in Texas.

Recent Publications And Awards Include

  • Driven by Debt: The Failure of the OmniBase Program (policy report co-written with Texas Appleseed, Aug. 2021)

  • Driven by Debt: How Driver’s License Suspensions Hurt Texas Families (policy report co-written with Texas Appleseed, March 2019)

  • City of Austin Distinguished Service Award, 2018

  • Pay or Stay: The High Cost of Jailing Texans for Fines and Fees (policy report co-written with Texas Appleseed, Feb. 2017)

  • Andrea Marsh & Emily Gerrick, Why Motive Matters: Designing Effective Policy Responses to Modern Debtors’ Prisons, 34 Yale L. & Pol'y Rev. 93 (2015)