Courses Offered:

Criminal Defense Clinic
Criminal Procedure
Race and the Law
Approaches to Lawyering

Professional Biographical Information:

Russell C. Gabriel is the director of the University of Georgia School of Law’s Criminal Defense Clinic.  He has a long history of experience as a public defender. He joined the school’s Legal Aid and Defender Clinic as a staff attorney in 1988 and was promoted to associate director in 1991. From 1993 to 1996, he served as a staff attorney with the Federal Defender Program, Inc., in Atlanta. In July 1996, he returned to UGA as the director of the Legal Aid and Defender Clinic. Through December, 2004, the Legal Aid and Defender Clinic was not only a law school clinical education program but was the public defender office for the Western Judicial Circuit. The law school’s responsibility for the public defender office ceased on January 1, 2005, when the newly created Georgia Public Defender Standards Council took control of legal representation for indigent criminal defendants throughout the state. Gabriel chose to remain at the law school and continue to teach the Criminal Defense Clinic course as well as other classes.

Gabriel is a member of the National and Georgia Associations of Criminal Defense Lawyers and has been honored by the law school’s student branch of the Equal Justice Foundation as an outstanding public interest attorney. He is involved in training new public defenders and speaks at criminal defense seminars. He is also a member of the State Bar of Georgia's Indigent Defense Committee.

Gabriel received his B.A. in psychology, with honors, from the University of Michigan in 1978. He earned his J.D. cum laude from the University of Georgia in 1985 and obtained his LL.M. from Harvard Law School in 1987. He served as an associate with the Washington, D.C., law firm Lobel, Novins, Lamont & Flug before becoming a public defender at UGA's Legal Aid and Defender Clinic.