Emily Gerrick
Senior Associate
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. At the Texas Fair Defense Project, 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.
In her free time, Emily enjoys playing D&D with friends and peek-a-boo with her baby.
Representative Matters Include
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
Pay or Stay: The High Cost of Jailing Texans for Fines and Fees (policy report co-written with Texas Appleseed, Feb. 2017)
Driven by Debt: How Driver’s License Suspensions Hurt Texas Families (policy report co-written with Texas Appleseed, March 2019)
Driven by Debt: The Failure of the OmniBase Program (policy report co-written with Texas Appleseed, Aug. 2021)
City of Austin Distinguished Service Award, 2018
Andrea Marsh & Emily Gerrick, Why Motive Matters: Designing Effective Policy Responses to Modern Debtors’ Prisons, 34 Yale L. & Pol'y Rev. 93 (2015)