KAIRYS - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Founding Partner
• President of the Board of Directors of the Defender Association of Philadelphia
• Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law

David Rudovsky is a founding partner of Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg, LLP. He has practiced in the civil rights and criminal defense fields for over forty years, including cases on police and governmental misconduct, prisoners' rights, first amendment freedoms, and racial discrimination. Mr. Rudovsky has argued two significant 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). He has also prepared numerous amicus briefs in civil rights cases in the Supreme Court and has argued scores of civil rights and criminal law cases in the federal and state courts. Since 1987, Mr. Rudovsky has been a Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law where he teaches courses in Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Criminal Law, and Evidence. Mr. Rudovsky has written a number of practice books for civil rights and criminal cases. These include Police Misconduct: Law & Litigation and The Law of Arrest, Search and Seizure in Pennsylvania. In addition, Mr. Rudovsky has written a number of scholarly articles in law reviews on civil rights and the criminal justice system. Mr. Rudovsky is President of the Board of Directors of the Defender Association of Philadelphia and is Vice President of the Board of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project. In 1986, Mr. Rudovsky was a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for his work in Criminal Justice. He has also been honored by the Philadelphia Bar Foundation with the 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. David Rudovsky is one of the firm's founding partners. He is a national leader in the fields of civil rights and civil liberties litigation… read more

Ms. Harris joined Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, Feinberg & Lin as an associate in early 2022. She is a new attorney with experience in civil rights and criminal defense practice. Ms. Harris joins the firm from the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, where she represented incarcerated people in federal civil rights litigation. Her focus was primarily the unconstitutional denial of medical care to incarcerated people, but she also assisted with cases involving excessive force, retaliation, disability accommodation, and access to counsel. She has worked with clients in federal, state, and county prison systems across Pennsylvania. As a certified legal intern, she represented clients on behalf of the Defender Association of Philadelphia and the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender. She has experience preparing sentencing and mitigation reports for the Federal Community Defender Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the Youth Sentencing and Reentry Project. Ms. Harris has worked and volunteered with a range of local public interest organizations including the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania, HIAS Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Prison Society, and Community Legal Services' Expungement Project. Ms. Harris graduated magna cum laude from Temple University Law School in 2020. She serves on the board of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Lawyer's Guild and is a co-chair of its Mass Defense Committee, coordinating legal observers in Philadelphia and surrounding counties.

Mr. Feinberg focuses his practice on civil rights litigation and criminal defense. He is an experienced trial lawyer and appellate litigator, having successfully tried cases and argued appeals in both state and federal court. Mr. Feinberg is an established expert in numerous areas of law in the civil rights and criminal defense fields. In the civil rights arena, he specializes in cases involving wrongful convictions and prosecutions of innocent persons, the excessive use of force by police and correctional officers, the unconstitutional denial of medical care to incarcerated and detained people, and abuses of noncitizens in the immigration system. In the criminal defense practice area, Mr. Feinberg has extensive experience litigating federal habeas corpus matters and state post-conviction challenges to convictions and prison sentences. Mr. Feinberg is an active participant and leader in the National Police Accountability Project (NPAP), the country's most prominent organization of legal professionals focused on law enforcement misconduct. He has served as a member of the organization's board of directors since 2013, and, in October 2023, was appointed as its president. Mr. Feinberg frequently lectures at continuing legal education courses and to law students on a variety of issues related to civil rights law and criminal defense practice. In the 2007-08 academic year, Mr. Feinberg served as an adjunct faculty member in the University of Pennsylvania Law School Civil Practice Clinic, and, in 2022, he returned to the classroom at the University of Pennsylvania Law School as an adjunct instructor, teaching a class he created regarding the litigation of civil rights cases in the law enforcement context. In addition to his volunteer service with NPAP, Mr. Feinberg regularly consults for and co-counsels with local public interest organizations, including the ACLU of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, and the Abolitionist Law Center, as well as national advocacy groups, including the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, American Immigration Council, and the National Immigrant Justice Center. Mr. Feinberg is a 2001 summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School where he was awarded the Best Oralist prize in the prestigious Edwin R. Keedy Cup moot court competition. After completing a judicial clerkship with the Honorable Jan E. DuBois of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Mr. Feinberg joined the firm in September 2002 and was promoted to partner in 2006. Jonathan H. Feinberg is an accomplished litigator with broad expertise in numerous areas of civil rights and criminal defense practice… read more

Job Titles:

• Co - Editor of the FUTURE of EVIDENCE

Jules Epstein joined the firm in 1990 and served as a partner, with a particular concentration on homicide and capital case litigation. He is now a Professor of Law and Director of Advocacy Programs at Temple University Beasley School of Law. As a law professor, Mr. Epstein has published extensively regarding the death penalty, eyewitness identification and evidence; he trains judges and lawyers nationally on evidence, forensics, and capital case law; and in the area of forensics he has participated in two DNA workgroups and on a working group on latent print issues for the National Institute for Standards and Technology. Mr. Epstein is co-editor of THE FUTURE OF EVIDENCE (ABA, 2011) and served as section editor for the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FORENSIC SCIENCES, 2 nd Edition. Mr. Epstein remains associated with the firm to handle post-conviction capital case matters as court-appointed or pro bono counsel and in select appellate litigation, particularly in amicus briefings on behalf of organizations such as the Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (PACDL). Jules Epstein, a national expert in the defense of capital cases, the use of forensic science in litigation and the law of evidence, is of counsel to the firm… read more

Job Titles:

• Adjunct Professor at Temple University School of Law

Paul Messing joined Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg in 1993 where he specializes in civil rights litigation and criminal defense representation. Mr. Messing represents plaintiffs in a broad range of civil rights cases, including issues related to police misconduct, prisoner's rights, homelessness, sexual assault victims, student violence, race and gender discrimination, and First Amendment violations. His recent litigation includes lawsuits which brought about reforms in the racial profiling practices of the Philadelphia Police Department, and in the treatment of political protesters, homeless persons and advocates, street musicians, Traffic Court procedures, and the improper searches of private homes. Mr. Messing provides criminal defense representation in state and federal court at the trial and appellate level. His clients include a broad range of political advocacy organizations in the areas of freedom of expression, housing, the rights of the homeless and those with disabilities, antiwar activists, and the victims of race, gender and sexual orientation discrimination. He has represented numerous political activists charged with criminal offenses in the course of exercising First Amendment rights. Mr. Messing also provides representation to persons charged with felony and misdemeanor offenses, including white collar prosecutions, at the state and federal level. Prior to joining Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg, Mr. Messing was a Senior Trial Attorney and Administrator at the Defender Association of Philadelphia. As Deputy Chief of the Felony Unit, he supervised more than one hundred trial attorneys and maintained a caseload of major felony cases. As Senior Trial Attorney, he provided representation to indigent criminal defendants at all levels of trial and appellate practice, including more than one hundred felony jury trials. Mr. Messing has been an Adjunct Professor at Temple University School of Law for more than twenty-five years where he teaches Integrated Trial Advocacy and Criminal Law, and a Visiting Professor at the Temple/Tsinghua School of Law LLM Program in Beijing where he teaches Evidence and Criminal Law and Procedure. He is also a member of the faculty of the National Institute of Trial Advocacy. Formerly, Mr. Messing was an Adjunct Professor at Rutgers School of Law at Camden where he taught the Criminal Litigation Clinic. He was also a Clinical Instructor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School where he taught a course in criminal defense litigation and supervised law students who served as trial counsel for indigent criminal defendants. Mr. Messing regularly serves as a Course Planner and Presenter for the Pennsylvania Bar Institute, the Philadelphia Bar Association and other organizations at conferences, training sessions and seminars relating to criminal defense issues and civil rights litigation. Paul Messing is a widely recognized civil rights and criminal defense attorney with nearly forty years of experience… read more

Ms. Lin is an experienced criminal defense attorney who has won numerous jury trials in both state and federal court. In addition to her trial work, she has guided many clients through the process of serving as a witness in grand jury proceedings and negotiating plea agreements with prosecutors. Ms. Lin is deeply familiar with federal sentencing law and has secured favorable sentences for her clients. She has also litigated numerous federal appeals and habeas petitions, including challenges to both state and federal convictions. She has represented individuals charged with a wide variety of offenses, including drug trafficking, assaults, robberies, kidnapping, firearm offenses, money laundering, trademark infringement, white collar fraud, immigration violations, sex crimes and international trade violations. Upon joining Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg, Ms. Lin has expanded her practice area to include civil rights litigation in cases involving misconduct by law enforcement officers. Ms. Lin has studied in Mexico, Chile, Taiwan, and China and is proficient in both Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. As co-chair of the Marutani Committee of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Pennsylvania, Ms. Lin takes great pleasure in helping to award summer fellowships to law students interested in government or public interest careers. She also serves as a member of the Legal Committee of the Philadelphia branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. She has taught the Federal Defender Clinical as an adjunct faculty member at Temple Law School. Ms. Lin is a regular contributor to the Federal Defender Third Circuit Blog. Ms. Lin is a 2004 graduate of Yale Law School and a 2000 graduate of Swarthmore College, where she was awarded high honors by external examiners. After law school, Ms. Lin clerked for the Honorable Anita B. Brody of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. She then worked as a local public defender at the Defender Association of Philadelphia. Prior to joining Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing and Feinberg as an associate attorney in 2014, Ms. Lin was an Assistant Federal Defender in the trial and appellate units at the Federal Community Defender Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Susan M. Lin is an experienced criminal defense trial attorney with a long record of success for her clients in both state and federal court… read more