Joel B. Rudin is a veteran criminal defense and civil rights lawyer and the principal in his own six-attorney firm. He has been honored with the Thurgood S. Marshall Award for Outstanding Criminal Defense Practitioner by the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. His diverse practice over 45 years has included state and federal criminal trials, appeals, and post-conviction motions as well as complex civil rights lawsuits obtaining monetary damages for victims of police misconduct and wrongful conviction.
Mr. Rudin has won nearly 40 seven-figure awards for wrongful convictions, including, in 2025, the largest jury verdict for wrongful conviction ever in the United States of $80 million and a verdict of $28 million in a related case (both in collaboration with WilmerHale and Buffalo attorney Spencer Durland). He has been uniquely successful in holding municipalities liable, under the Supreme Court’s Monell doctrine, for the unlawful policies and practices of local district attorneys in allowing prosecutors to unconstitutionally withhold favorable evidence (“Brady material”) and to engage in other trial-related misconduct, thereby overcoming the bar to recovery for prosecutorial misconduct of absolute immunity. In the Jabbar Collins case, in the course of overturning his client’s false conviction for murder and recovering $13 million in damages in 2013, Mr. Rudin uncovered evidence of systemic misconduct by the long-time Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles Hynes, helped bring about Hynes’s electoral defeat, and inspired his successor to implement the Office’s trailblazing Conviction Review Unit.
Mr. Rudin briefed and argued in the U.S. Supreme Court a leading federal criminal case limiting the authority of federal magistrate judges, Gomez v. United States, 490 U.S. 858 (1989). He has successfully handled numerous other state and federal criminal and civil appeals and collateral attacks on criminal convictions, many of which have involved misconduct by prosecutors. He has written about the failure of the courts and bar to discipline prosecutors and how to seek civil remedies for such misconduct in The Supreme Court Assumes Errant Prosecutors Will Be Disciplined by Their Offices or the Bar: Three Case Studies that Prove that Assumption Wrong, 80 Fordham L. Rev. 537 (2011); Suing for Prosecutorial Misconduct, The Champion, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (2010); and Reversing the Malcolm X Convictions: How It Happened, How Far We’ve Come, How Far We Need To Go, New York State Bar Association (2021). He is vice chair of the Amicus Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (“NACDL”) and has authored numerous briefs filed in the United States Supreme Court and other appellate courts on behalf of that and other public interest organizations. He lives in New York City with his wife, Naomi, a psychotherapist.