Katherine Rosenfeld

Judge Shira A. Scheindlin certified the Casale class on June 1, 2009, and on April 26, 2010 held the City in contempt, gave it six months to comply, set escalating fines for later violations and sanctioned it for losing at least thirty-four paper summonses. The 2012 class settlement created a $15 million fund for about 22,000 people charged between 1983 and 2012. It set up a process to vacate, dismiss and seal their cases, required destruction of the related fingerprints and photographs where the sealing law called for it, and provided for annual training, warnings printed on summons packages and review of the unofficial precinct sheets.

Eight Days at MDC Brooklyn

On January 27, 2019, during a polar vortex, a fire and power outage left the west building of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn without electricity for eight days. More than 1,600 people were held in dark, freezing cells, many of them locked in for twenty-four hours a day, without hot water or working toilets and with too little food, medicine, clothing and blankets, and without calls to their families. Rosenfeld was class counsel in Scott v. United States in the Eastern District of New York with O. Andrew F. Wilson and Sara Estela, working with the Civil Rights Clinic at Cardozo School of Law under Professor Betsy Ginsberg and with Alexander A. Reinert. Judge Edward R. Korman wrote that the evidence "paints a harrowing picture of prison conditions" after the fire. The settlement announced on August 21, 2023, worth about $10 million, paid $8,750 to each of nearly 1,000 claimants, a further $8,750 to sixty-nine people whose medical conditions had gone untreated, and $2,500 to about 554 late claimants.

She is class counsel with the Legal Aid Society in Nunez v. City of New York, whose 2015 consent judgment imposed hundreds of requirements on the City's jails and an independent monitor over force, supervision, investigations, discipline and staffing. On November 27, 2024 Judge Laura Taylor Swain found the City in contempt of all eighteen provisions the plaintiffs had presented, and on January 27, 2026 she named Nicholas Deml, formerly Vermont's corrections commissioner, as the remediation manager for the jails on Rikers Island, reporting to the court. In 2018 the City had sent four young men from Rikers to the Albany County jail, where they were held in solitary confinement and, they alleged, beaten and sexually assaulted by guards; the October 2019 settlement she and her co-counsel reached paid $1 million, barred such transfers to Albany County through 2021, required written notice of transfers elsewhere, and bound Albany County to the City's solitary-confinement rules through 2023. "In the future, nobody will have to go through what we went through," said Davon Washington, one of the four. The City paid $2 million in Livermore v. City of New York, over a death from untreated alcohol withdrawal at the Manhattan Detention Complex, and $1.5 million over Patrick Miller's death in custody. In Kadeem John's case, officials had reviewed surveillance footage and failed to keep it; in March 2012 the court barred the defendants from describing the missing video and authorized an instruction that it had existed, had been destroyed and would have supported John's account, and the City paid $850,000.

Legal Director

Rosenfeld graduated from the University of Chicago in 1996 and from Yale Law School in 2001, clerked for Judge Dean D. Pregerson of the Central District of California, and began in prisoners' rights and employment discrimination at Koob & Magoolaghan before joining Emery Celli in 2004. From 2014 to 2017 she was legal director of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. In Filer v. City of New York, the 2017 settlement required the NYPD to adopt its first policy under the Americans with Disabilities Act for transporting arrested wheelchair users in accessible vehicles, with NYLPI monitoring compliance, and in Jorge v. New York City Transit Authority the 2015 settlement required Access-A-Ride to interpret on hotline calls, at application centers and in disability evaluations, to translate critical documents and to accept paperwork in an applicant's own language. A 2016 agreement reached through structured negotiation addressed access to New York City courthouses for people with mobility impairments. She was an author of NYLPI's 2017 report on health care in immigration detention, Detained and Denied, and brought Charles v. Orange County over the release of immigration detainees without mental-health discharge planning. She returned to Emery Celli as a partner in 2017. She is admitted in New York and New Jersey, in the Southern, Eastern and Northern Districts of New York and before the Second Circuit, and has taught at the National Institute for Trial Advocacy's northeast program and lectured on civil rights at Columbia, Yale, Cardozo and Fordham.

Section 611

New York Correction Law section 611 limits the restraint of pregnant people. A 2019 settlement Rosenfeld secured paid $610,000 and revised the NYPD Patrol Guide on restraints during pregnancy, labor, delivery and recovery, including who may authorize them, how medical instructions govern and what supervisors must record; a second settlement, in 2021, paid $750,000 and required roll-call training across the department on the treatment of pregnant people. In Fair Housing Justice Center v. Kara Realty she obtained $212,000 and a three-year injunction covering sixteen buildings and more than 900 rental units, and in Cruz v. Nieves a Bronx County jury found for a gay man who had been refused housing because of his sexual orientation. Her class work also includes a $6.632 million preliminary settlement for hundreds of former New York-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell medical residents over FICA tax refunds and the disclosures that went with them.

26 Federal Plaza

Rosenfeld and her colleagues represent African Communities Together and The Door, with the New York Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union and Make the Road New York, in a challenge to the government's practices at New York's immigration courts: oral motions to dismiss cases in the courtroom and civil immigration arrests at the courthouse doors, which exposed people required to attend their hearings to arrest before their claims were heard. In September 2025 the court stayed the dismissal policy in Manhattan and the Bronx. In March 2026 the government conceded that its May 2025 courthouse-arrest guidance "does not and never has" applied to immigration courts, and on May 18, 2026 Judge P. Kevin Castel found a substantial likelihood that rescinding the narrower 2021 courthouse rules without a replacement was arbitrary and capricious. His stay restored those protections at 26 Federal Plaza, 201 Varick Street and 290 Broadway, where civil immigration arrests in or near the courts are now barred outside a short list of enumerated circumstances.