Program Book for the 250th Anniversary - Flipbook - Page 26
DAVID RUDOVSKY
David Rudovsky is a founding partner of Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, Feinberg & Lin. He has practiced in the civil rights and
criminal defense fields for 55 years, both in private practice and as an attorney at the Defender Association of Philadelphia.
His civil rights litigation has focused on police and governmental misconduct, prisoner rights, first amendment freedoms,
and racial discrimination.
He has argued two civil rights cases in the United States Supreme Court: Mitchell v. Forsyth (1985) (immunity of Attorney
General for illegal electronic surveillance) and City of Canton v. Harris (1989) (liability of municipalities for civil rights
violations by police).
Since 1987, he has been a Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School where he teaches courses in
Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Criminal Law, and Evidence, and he is the author of Police Misconduct: Law & Litigation
and The Law of Arrest, Search and Seizure in Pennsylvania. In addition, he has published law review articles on civil rights
and the criminal justice system.
Mr. Rudovsky is a past-President of the Board of Directors of the Defender Association of Philadelphia and has served as
Vice President of the Board of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project.
In 1986, he was a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award for his work in Criminal Justice. He is also
the recipient of the Philadelphia Bar Foundation Judge Gerald F. Flood Award for Public Interest Accomplishments, the
ACLU Civil Liberties Award, and the Philadelphia Bar Association Cesare Beccaria Award for Criminal Justice. At Penn Law
School, he has been the recipient on several occasions of the student-voted award for teaching excellence.
