About
Marshall Goldberg has had a varied career as both a lawyer and writer.
An honors graduate of Harvard College and valedictory speaker at Stanford Law School, Goldberg clerked for Judge Robert F. Peckham of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. He went on to become Counsel for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, where he was lead counsel on the extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Later he served in the Justice Department as legislative liaison for the Civil Rights Division, as well as a litigator in civil rights cases against the North Carolina state prison and mental hospital system.
In 1979 Goldberg moved to Los Angeles to try his hand at writing, and spent the next 24 years writing or producing such shows as “Diff’rent Strokes,” “The Jeffersons,” “Paper Chase,” “Newhart,” “L.A. Law,” “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” and “Life Goes On,” along with eight television movies, three screenplays and an animated feature. He has been a Humanitas Prize and Writers Guild Award finalist, and taught screenwriting at USC Film School.
From 2003-2005 Goldberg put aside his writing career to serve as General Counsel to the Writers Guild of America, west, where he was responsible for all legal matters involving the Guild’s 11,000 members. Eventually he was named the Guild’s Deputy Executive Director. In late 2005 he left the WGA and began writing novels.
In 2014 he wrote a historical novel, The New Colossus, featuring Nellie Bly as its main character, and published by Diversion Books.
In 2012, he developed a semester-long course, “Narrative Skills and the Law,” to teach law students how to tell a compelling story. He taught the course at Stanford Law School in the fall, 2012, and at Michigan Law School from 2013 to 2018. He has also presented the course at major law firms and state bars for continuing education credits.
Beginning in 2013, he began work on a documentary on the criminal justice system, "Justice, USA," that would put the audience in the shoes of indigent criminal defendants. The project came to fruition with a six-episode series filmed in Nashville, TN, that will air on MAX beginning March 14, 2024.
He is currently working on his next novel and a documentary on voter suppression.