Katherine Rosenfeld

Class Relief and Lasting Reform

Katherine Rosenfeld has secured class settlements, court orders, and lasting reforms in matters involving unlawful summonses, disability and language access, jail conditions, pregnancy restraints, immigration courts, and medical-resident tax refunds.

Brown and Casale

New York courts invalidated three loitering provisions in 1983, 1988, and 1992. In Brown v. Kelly and Casale v. Kelly, Rosenfeld helped establish that the void provisions remained in police materials and continued to generate summonses.

A federal court directed New York City in June 2005 to stop enforcing the begging provision. Officers nevertheless issued 772 summonses under it during the next nineteen months, and the parties later identified hundreds more summonses issued under the three provisions through February 2010.

The volume of post-order summonses made precinct reference sheets, summons packages, training, supervision, and record systems part of the proof. Those materials showed how void offenses could remain in the tools officers used during daily enforcement.

In April 2010, the district court held the City in contempt, allowed six months for compliance, imposed escalating fines for future violations, and sanctioned the loss of at least thirty-four paper summonses.

The escalating sanctions gave the prior order an operating consequence: future charges could trigger monetary penalties, while the loss of summonses altered the City’s evidentiary position.

The 2012 class settlement created a $15 million fund for approximately 22,000 people charged between 1983 and 2012. It also established a process to vacate, dismiss, and seal qualifying cases; required destruction of related fingerprints and photographs when sealing law required it; and provided for annual training, warnings on summons packages, and review of unofficial precinct reference sheets.

The settlement worked in two directions. Vacatur, dismissal, sealing, and destruction of related records repaired past cases; training, package warnings, and review of precinct sheets changed the materials officers would use in later encounters.

Disability and Language Access

Rosenfeld handled Filer v. City of New York while serving as Legal Director of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. The 2017 settlement required the NYPD to create its first Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant policy for transporting arrested wheelchair users in accessible vehicles, with NYLPI continuing to monitor compliance.

An accessible-transport policy had to reach dispatch, vehicle availability, securement equipment, station selection, transfers, officer training, and the procedure used when an accessible van was not immediately nearby. Monitoring tested whether dispatchers and officers could use those requirements during an actual arrest.

She also directed Jorge v. New York City Transit Authority at NYLPI. The 2015 settlement required Access-A-Ride to provide interpretation during hotline calls, application-center visits, and disability evaluations, translate critical documents, and accept paperwork submitted in an applicant’s language.

Access-A-Ride applicants move through interviews, disability evaluations, scheduling, determinations, changes, and appeals. The settlement placed interpretation and translated documents at those decision points so applicants could use the federally required paratransit service throughout the process.

Evidence Preservation and Jail Reform

In Kadeem John’s case, Rosenfeld obtained a significant remedy after officials reviewed but failed to preserve surveillance footage. In March 2012, the district court barred defendants from describing the missing video and authorized an instruction that the recording had existed, had been destroyed, and would have supported John’s account. The City later paid $850,000 to resolve the claim.

The recording could have fixed officer location, timing, warning, and response. Because those images could not be recreated through witness memory, the spoliation remedy changed how the remaining testimony and records could be weighed at trial.

Rosenfeld also served as class counsel in Nunez v. City of New York. A 2015 consent judgment imposed hundreds of requirements and established independent monitoring of force, supervision, investigations, discipline, staffing, and compliance in City jails.

In November 2024, the district court found the City in contempt of all eighteen provisions presented on the plaintiffs’ motion. The court ordered an independent remediation manager, and in January 2026 selected former Vermont corrections commissioner Nicholas Deml with authority and reporting duties concerning staffing, supervision, force review, investigations, discipline, and daily jail management.

The monitor’s recurring findings created a continuing record rather than a one-time compliance review. The remediation-manager order supplied a path for translating that record into daily jail operations.

Pregnancy-Restraint Reforms

A 2019 settlement secured by Rosenfeld provided $610,000 and revisions to the NYPD Patrol Guide governing restraints during pregnancy, labor, delivery, and recovery. The revised procedure addressed authorization, medical instructions, supervisor responsibility, and documentation.

A second settlement in 2021 provided $750,000 and required department-wide roll-call training on the treatment of pregnant people. The reforms translated New York Correction Law section 611’s restraint prohibition into written operating guidance and training.

Immigration-Court Protections

Rosenfeld and the ECBAWM team represent African Communities Together and The Door with the NYCLU, ACLU, and Make the Road New York in a challenge to federal dismissal and enforcement practices at New York immigration courts.

The suit challenged oral motions to dismiss proceedings inside the courtroom and civil immigration enforcement at the courthouse doors, practices that could expose people required to attend hearings to arrest before their claims were heard. It sought Administrative Procedure Act review and treated safe courthouse access as part of the ability to pursue asylum and other relief.

In September 2025, the district court stayed the government’s dismissal policy in Manhattan and the Bronx. On May 18, 2026, the court found a substantial likelihood that rescinding the narrower 2021 courthouse rules without a replacement policy was arbitrary and capricious. The resulting stay restored those protections at 26 Federal Plaza, 201 Varick Street, and 290 Broadway, largely prohibiting civil immigration enforcement actions in or near the three courthouses.

Medical-Resident Class Settlement

Rosenfeld’s class work also includes a $6.632 million preliminary settlement for hundreds of former New York-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell medical residents. The consolidated Rule 23 actions concern FICA tax refunds and disclosures associated with those refunds.

Practice and Background

From 2014 through 2017, Rosenfeld served as NYLPI’s Legal Director, leading litigation and policy work involving disability, transportation, education, immigration, housing, public accommodations, language access, criminal justice, and health conditions. She later returned to ECBAWM as a partner.

Rosenfeld graduated from the University of Chicago and Yale Law School, clerked for Judge Dean Pregerson, and began her career in prisoners’ rights and employment discrimination. Her current practice includes civil-rights, employment, discrimination, commercial, class, trial, and appellate matters.