Grace Harris joined Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, Feinberg & Lin as an associate in early 2022. She has experience in civil rights work, focusing on police and prison misconduct, and both state and federal criminal defense. Her civil practice includes cases involving wrongful prosecutions and convictions of innocent people, inadequate medical and mental health care in prison, excessive force by police officers and prison staff, and other official misconduct. In Grace’s criminal defense and post-conviction practice, she has represented people charged with a range of offenses, including political protest-related offenses, drug offenses, firearm offenses, assaults, and homicide.
Grace came to the firm from the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, where she represented incarcerated people in federal civil rights litigation. In her work at PILP, she focused primarily on 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.
Grace has worked and volunteered with a range of local public interest organizations including the Defender Association of Philadelphia, the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender, the Federal Community Defender Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the Youth Sentencing and Reentry Project, AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania, HIAS Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Prison Society, and Community Legal Services’ Expungement Project.
Grace graduated magna cum laude from Temple University Law School in 2020. She serves as a co-chair of the board of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.
