Samuel R. Gross, J.D., Thomas G. and Mabel Long Professor of Law and professor of law in the Law School, retired from active faculty status on May 31, 2018. Professor Gross received his A.B. degree from Columbia College in 1968 and his J.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973. He joined the University of Michigan faculty as an associate professor in 1987, and was promoted to professor in 1990. He was named the Thomas G. and Mabel Long Professor of Law in 1998. He also taught at Stanford University and Yale University.

Professor Gross is a leading scholar of evidence law, the death penalty, false convictions, racial profiling, eyewitness identification, and the relationship between pretrial bargaining and trial verdicts. He worked as an attorney with the United Farm Workers Union in California and the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee in Nebraska and South Dakota. Professor Gross served as a criminal defense attorney in San Francisco, California for several years. As a cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York and the National Jury Project in California, he litigated a series of test cases on jury selection in capital trials and worked on the issue of racial discrimination in the application of the death penalty. Shortly after joining the faculty, Professor Gross co-authored, with psychologist Robert Mauro, Death and Discrimination: Racial Disparities in Capital Sentencing in 1989. He later teamed up with sociologist and fellow University of Michigan Professor Richard 0. Lempert to co-author a leading casebook, A Modern Approach to Evidence: Texts, Problems, Transcripts, and Cases, which is now in its 5th edition (2013). His numerous articles have appeared in the nation's leading law reviews. Professor Gross also earned national recognition for his work as a senior editor and co-founder of the National Registry of Exonerations, which was launched in May 2012 and maintains a detailed online database of all known exonerations in the United States since 1989. In addition to several reports written for the National Registry of Exonerations, Professor Gross co-authored a prominent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This study estimated the percentage of innocent defendants sentenced to death in the United States since 1973 to be greater than four percent.

The Regents now salute this distinguished teacher and scholar by naming Samuel R. Gross, Thomas G. and Mabel Long Professor Emeritus of Law and professor emeritus of law.