Sam Jacobs

Adjunct Professor

Part-Time Faculty

Biography

Sam Jacobs is a criminal defense attorney. She litigated capital postconviction writs of habeas corpus for fifteen years in Louisiana and California, most recently as Supervising Counsel at the Habeas Corpus Resource Center.

Sam is currently an adjunct lecturer at UC Berkeley School of Law and USF School of Law. She continues to consult on capital cases, and where her research and work focus on how racially biased language and discursive practices impact the outcomes in criminal trials.

Expertise

Capital punishment
Criminal law

Research Areas

Capital punishment
Criminal law
Language and the law

Education

Yale Law School, JD, 2008
Brown University, BA in Development Studies, 2003

Prior Experience

Supervising Counsel, Habeas Corpus Resource Center
Adjunct Lecturer, UC Berkeley School of Law

Selected Publications

King, Sharese and Jacobs, Samantha. "Talk about testimony: courtroom dialogue as racialized interactions" Linguistics Vanguard, vol. 10, no. s3, 2024, pp. 265-272.