Professor Goold joined the law school as an Associate Professor in January 2010, and was promoted to Professor in July 2013. From 2003 to 2009, he was a Lecturer at the University of Oxford Faculty of Law and a Fellow in Law at Somerville College, where he taught criminal law, criminology, and torts. Prior to taking up his post at Oxford, he taught law at the University of Niigata in Japan and criminology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. He has also been a visiting researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg, Germany and at the Centre de Recherches Sociologiques sur les Droits et Institutions Pénales in Paris.

Professor Goold holds degrees in law and economics from the University of Tasmania, as well as a BCL and doctorate from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His major research interests include privacy rights, the use of surveillance technologies by the police and intelligence communities, and the rhetoric and language of human rights. He is the author of numerous works on privacy, surveillance, and security, including CCTV and Policing (Oxford University Press; shortlisted for the British Criminology Book Prize in 2005) and Security and Human Rights (Hart Publishing; edited with Liora Lazarus). Among his more recent publications are works on the social and political dimensions of privacy, the relationship between human rights and constitutional responsibilities, and the sociology of security consumption. Professor Goold has served as an independent advisor to the UK Identity and Passport Service on matters of regulation and data sharing and has acted as Specialist Legal Advisor to a major House of Lords inquiry into surveillance and data collection in Britain. He is currently a member of the BC Information and Privacy Commissioner's External Advisory Board.