Earlier this month, David Rudovsky, senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a founding partner of the public interest law firm of Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg, presented the 2014 Constitution Day lecture at Swarthmore College on “Policing and Racial Justice." Rudovsky is one of the nation’s leading civil rights and criminal defense attorneys and is an authority on police practices and police misconduct. He has been involved in challenging stop and frisk practices in New York and Philadelphia and has worked to combat the recent rise in mass incarceration that disproportionately affects African-Americans. For more than 40 years, he has been involved in litigating crowded conditions and conditions of confinement in the Philadelphia prison system. He also helped to  establish the Pennsylvania Innocence Project.

Rudovsky holds an LLB from NYU and is co-author (with Michael Avery and Karen Blum) of Police Misconduct: Law and Litigation. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the ACLU Civil Liberties Award, and multiple awards for excellence in teaching.

His talk was sponsored by the Office of the President and the Department of Political Science.